Apparently, Barack Obama’s ingenious strategy to confront the national debt is to double it.  And then triple it. 

His endless hurricane of bailout packages, budget proposals, pet social projects and supplementary spending bills will inflate wasteful federal spending, deficits and national debt to unfathomable levels. 

Under Obama’s budget projection, spending will rise to an astounding 28.5% of gross domestic product (GDP), an increase of $8,000 per household.  The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) concluded that this will add $9.3 trillion to existing national debt, thereby doubling it in six years, and tripling it in ten years.  By 2019, total national debt will reach 82.4% of GDP, a level that even White House Budget Director Peter Orszag labels “unsustainable.” 

And that’s just the spending. 

Obama’s budget also raises income taxes approximately $1 trillion over the next ten years, most of that hitting small businesses that account for a majority of American employment and new hires.  Additionally, his destructive carbon cap-and-trade proposal will heap $646 billion in new costs upon manufacturers and businesses, as if business and industry are sitting on $646 billion in spare cash in this economy. 

As is always the case with attempts to tax businesses, of course, those new cap-and-trade costs will merely be passed to consumers.  According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Joint Program on the Science of Climate Change, Obama’s proposal will translate into $3,128 in increased energy costs per household each year. 

That’s over $11,000 per American household each year in increased government spending and energy costs.  The sheer increase in government size, inefficiency and economic costs that Obama’s agenda will create truly boggles the mind. 

So what is the area on which he chose to allege waste of taxpayer dollars during his press conference this week? 

Military procurement.    

Throughout his press conference, which began with a statement read from his jumbotron, Obama defended every boondoggle spending proposal, which he recharacterized as “investment.”  In particular, he repeatedly promoted his global warming, healthcare and educational pet projects, disregarding the fact that none of these issues caused current economic downturn. 

After all, Rahm Emanuel and Hillary Clinton won’t allow him to let this crisis go to waste. 

Approximately halfway through his press conference, however, reporter Kevin Baron of Stars and Stripes asked, “Mr. President, where do you plan to find savings in the Defense and Veterans Administration's budgets … when so many items that may be destined for the chopping block seem politically untenable, from major weapons systems, as you mentioned in procurement, to wounded warrior costs, or increased operations in Afghanistan, or the size of the military itself?” 

That’s when Obama suddenly discovered a type of federal spending that he considers a waste of taxpayer dollars: 

“There is uniform acknowledgement that the procurement system right now doesn't work. That's not just my opinion. That's John McCain's opinion. That's Carl Levin's opinion. There are a whole host of people who are students of the procurement process that will say, if you've got a whole range of billion-dollar, multibillion-dollar systems that are -- where we're seeing cost overruns of 30 percent or 40 percent or 50 percent, and then still don't perform the way they're supposed to or are [sic] providing our troops with the kinds of tools that they need to succeed on their missions, then we've got a problem.

“Now, I think everybody in this town knows that the politics of changing procurement is tough, because, you know, lobbyists are very active in this area. You know, contractors are very good at dispersing the jobs and plants in the Defense Department widely. And so what we have to do is to go through this process very carefully, be more disciplined than we've been in the last several years.  As I've said, we've already identified potentially $40 billion in savings just by some of the procurement reforms that are pretty apparent to a lot -- a lot of critics out there. And we are going to continue to find savings in a way that allows us to put the resources where they're needed, but to make sure that we're not simply fattening defense contractors.”

Not that the military budget should be immune from scrutiny, but imagine for a moment Barack Obama lambasting “cost overruns,” “overactive lobbyists,” projects that “still don’t perform the way they’re supposed to” and “fattening” bureaucrats in more sacred portions of our labyrinthine federal government. 

On the heels of reports last week that Obama seeks to charge private insurers for medical treatment of veterans, this takes on an even more ominous tone.  And the most ironic element of Obama’s pronouncement is that the military is one of the few functions that the federal government does perform well. 

President Obama, your proposed budget is an ocean of waste and inefficient government.  The Defense Department is probably the last area on which you should focus right now.