Looking for the President’s FY2012 budget, I noticed right away the inanity dripping from the first paragraph on the White House propaganda page for it:

Having emerged from the worst recession in generations, the President has put forward a plan to rebuild our economy and win the future by out-innovating, out-educating, and out-building our global competitors and creating the jobs and industries of tomorrow. But we cannot rebuild our economy and win the future if we pass on a mountain of debt to our children and grandchildren. We must restore fiscal responsibility, and reform our government to make it more effective, efficient, and open to the American people.

I decided that paragraph needed commentary.

Having emerged from the worst recession in generations,

In what alternate universe is the recession over? Oh, some measure of economic output are positive, so technically the recession is past.  But we have not emerged from it, past tense; we are now fighting our way out of it, despite massive government effort to keep us from doing so.

the President has put forward a plan to rebuild our economy

If the recession is over, why does the economy need to be rebuilt?

and win the future by out-innovating, out-educating, and out-building our global competitors

That phrase “global competitors” reveals a flawed model.  We are not, or should not be, in an economic competition against other nations, in which one loses and another wins.   Rather, we should be happy when other nations thrive, as this provides a market for our goods and solves all manner of military and social problems for us. Our only concern should be that we do well, not doing better than others do.

And the particular measures the socialists in the White House plan to use to achieve their version of the Soviet 5-year Plan are completely silly.  One doesn’t innovate by fiat, or by providing innovation grants.  A free citizen or group of citizens innovate when they see an opportunity to do something in a new and more profitable way.  It doesn’t take government assistance; it only takes the government getting out of the way.

Education is not a competition.  Trying to create a workforce that is the “best” educated is a fool’s errand, because by the time you have planned their curriculum and gotten them through it the needs have changed.  A top-down planned curriculum and strategy will misallocate education resources, wasting lives and costing opportunities. Because a year spent teaching someone to repair solar panels or whatever skill you guess will be needed is a year that person can never get back.

and creating the jobs and industries of tomorrow.

The top-down socialist mindset again shines through.  There are at least two problems with trying to create the jobs and industries of tomorrow: we don’t know what they are, and not knowing, we don’t know how to do them yet, much less how to train people to do them.  One could say vacuously that a person should be equipped therefor with the basic skills and knowledge needed to learn to do the jobs of the future, but that isn’t the message here.

But we cannot rebuild our economy and win the future if we pass on a mountain of debt to our children and grandchildren.

The Obama budget will add  $1.6 trillion to the national debt.  If there is another word for that than “mountain”, I’m not sure it can be used in polite company.  Oh, and shut up.

We must restore fiscal responsibility,

Raise taxes …

and reform our government to make it more effective, efficient, and open to the American people.

… and generate as much union bloat and federal government jobs as we can for our loyal Democrats.

Well.  They said they were going to make soaking the rich a feature of their 2012 election campaign, and now they’ve started it with the FY2012 budget.