Seriously, President Obama, are you the Chief Executive of Fantasyland

Or are you planning to tax America to death? President Obama has pledged, on the heels of a nearly $1 trillion stimulus bill, to half the federal deficit in the next four years.

I don't know what the exact amount of the deficit is, but I know it is in teh multi-trillion dollar range.

President Obama launched a "fiscal responsibility summit" at the White House today by vowing to cut the federal deficit in half by the end of his first term in office, and he pledged to reinstate pay-as-you-go budgeting rules to prevent the government from spending money it does not have.

(Except for money allocated on my watch). Apparently pay-go budgeting doesn't apply to massive porkulus bills.

In a stern speech at the opening of the meeting of lawmakers, independent experts and advocates, Obama strongly denounced what he described as dishonest budgeting practices during the Bush administration, which he said had budgeted "zero dollars" for the Iraq war or for natural disasters, preferring to use emergency supplemental funds that entailed heavy deficit spending.

Look, the Bush Administration has much to answer for when it came to budgeting and spending and I am not letting them off the hook. I think the Bush White House needed to allocate more budget to the Iraq war, but really, how do you "budget for natural disasters." In essence, Obama is taking the Bush administration to task for spending too much on the Katrina? Or rather, for not budgeting the money for Katrina recovery. Seems a little squishy to me.

Unless the government drastically alters the manner in which it spends money, those tax cuts that were included in the stimulus bill will become a thing of the past and we will see more tax increases.