Delusional Thinking

In a movie about a submarine, there is a scene where the boat is plunging downward out of control. Everyone is staring at the depth gauge, where the needle is moving inexorably deeper. The needle hits the peg at maximum depth, a few seconds later the depth gauge explodes, and then the screen goes black. As a former submariner, that scene sort of freaked me out.

When I read the headline that said that Obama’s proposed budget would “trim the deficit by $1.1 trillion in ten years” my bullshit meter not only hit the peg, the meter exploded. When, within the article, I read that “it's not clear yet where all of the estimated $1.1 trillion in deficit reduction will come from,” I thought I might have to turn my computer off.

For one thing, even if he is reelected, Obama will have been out of office for four years before this proposed budget expires, for God’s sake, so just how realistic is anything contained in this piece of nonsense? In any case, nobody has a clue what economic conditions are going to prevail three years from now, let alone ten years.

Supposedly he is trying to appease “deficit hawks” with this jackassery. I am not a deficit hawk, by any means, but if I were one I would be offended by this, not appeased. The current deficit is about $1.3 $1.7 trillion, and he’s saying that we are not going to get rid of it, we’re only going to come within shouting distance of doing so barely going to get rid of more than half of it, we’re going to take ten full years to do it, and there are no specifics as to how we’re going to do it.

And we are “denying them space in which to plan their attacks.” Yikes.