That was a lovely piece of chamber music President Obama performed Monday at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, but look beyond the soothing words and about all you find is a classic piece of Washington Wink-Wink designed to reassure the special interests that they have nothing to worry about.
"And I am eager to work with both parties and with the Chamber to take additional steps across the budget to put our nation on a sounder fiscal footing," Obama told the assembled business executives listening skeptically but respectfully at the Chamber's H Street headquarters.
Those words came a day after Obama's Office of Management and Budget Director Jack Lew wrote in an opinion piece published by the New York Times that Obama believes that "to make room for the investments we need to foster growth, we have to cut what we cannot afford. We have to reduce the burden placed on our economy by years of deficits and debt."
That all sounds great, which is the first wink. The second wink comes when Washington politicians like Obama and Lew -- plus President George W. Bush and a long line of congressional Republicans who talked about cutting federal spending even as they ran it up to then-record levels -- actually get around to making what Lew called the "tough choices" about where to cut spending.
Lew provided a perfect illustration, noting that Obama supports community block grants because they enable the sort of community organizing that the president pursued before being elected to public office.
Despite that background, Lew said, Obama is proposing a whopping total of $775 million in spending cuts as part of his 2012 federal budget proposal. Yes, you read that right, $775 million. That's the second win because the deficit for 2011 was $1.5 trillion in a budget that spent nearly $4 trillion.
Even with the federal spending "freeze" Obama proposed in his State of the Union address and which he claimed would save $400 billion over the next decade, total federal spending will actually increase during the same period, thanks to formula-based entitlement spending.
That's the Washington Wink-Wink in action - talk a great case on the looming fiscal disaster that will befall us if federal spending is not brought under control before the next dawn, but then propose only the smallest possible cuts and do absolutely nothing about the entitlements - Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid -- that are literally bankrupting the nation and robbing our children and grandchildren of their futures.
Sometimes the best way to illustrate the Washington Wink-Wink on spending is via charts. Blogger Doug Ross has done a superb job of putting the Obama-Lew spending cuts in visual context with the chart that accompanies this column.
To the naked eye, it appears that there are only two colors, red for 2011 deficit and blue for the 2011 spending that was paid for through tax and other federal revenues. But trust me, there is a third color on that chart, green, for the $775 million in spending cuts proposed by Obama-Lew. It's so tiny, you literally need a magnifying glass to see it.
To see what the chart looks like magnified 10 times, Google "Obama's tough budget cuts in pictures" to get you to the blog, Doug Ross @ journal. He promises it will be "75 percent snark-free or your money back."
Elections are the way we demand our money back from politicians who think we don't see right through their Washington Wink-Winks.
Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner and proprietor of Tapscott's CopyDesk blog on washingtonexaminer.com
