CATO has up a new video explaining the VAT. We probably all need to get educated on this.

Ok, so the essence of Obama’s fiscal policy is to increase taxes and fees on business and on the top-earning 5% of the population. Everyone else gets tax cuts and vast increases in services, like national health insurance and enforced production of electric cars. And of course, the government has to keep stimulating the economy, because shlubs like you and I are so uncertain about the economic future that we’d rather save our money than spend it.

So what do you do when you’re the latest in a long line of Presidents to pledge fiscal responsibility while spending world-record amounts of money? You borrow the money you need to keep the string going. Obama’s first year in office will see a deficit of almost $2 trillion, about four times the biggest deficit that George W. Bush ever ran.

There are two problems with this, one minor and one serious. The minor problem is that Obama promised us a fiscally-responsible Presidency. He’s on record with a promise that when he leaves office, the Federal deficit will be no larger than 3% of GDP. (His first one will be 12% of GDP.) That’s not a problem because Obama can say whatever he wants and people will believe it. He will certainly claim that he fulfilled this promise, and be given credit for doing so, regardless of reality.

The serious problem is that no one knows what the impact will be of borrowing a trillion or more dollars every year for the forseeable future. Today, the public debt of the US is a bit more than 40% of GDP.  Sometime in the next five to ten years, it will hit 100%. Already there are signs that the bond markets are starting to find it a lot less attractive to lend money to the US Treasury.

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Somewhat peevishly, the President went to some lengths to portray his current budget as fiscally disciplined. One supposes that he gave his people the mandate to find some impressive number of programs to cut, amounting to some impressive dollar amount. In the event, he got 121 cut programs (most of the cuts had already been announced, like the F-22 Raptor), amounting to $17 billion.

Now you know that Congress will restore most, all, or more than all, of those cuts. And you know that Obama knows that, too. So obviously, the whole exercise was intended to give him a sound bite and nothing more. But look, that matters tremendously, because from now until the end of his term in office (and beyond), Obama will say that he was the first President in goodness-knows how long to actually cut the budget.

For proof, he’ll have the news headlines: “Obama cuts $17 billion in spending; Starts making the hard choices; Down-payment on Fiscal Responsibility.” Repeating lies endlessly makes them true.

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