Bad budgets and worse budgets

The White House's 2012 budget proposes significant cuts to
financial aid, community development and low-income energy assistance. The
Pentagon, however, gets exactly the budget it requested. (See the full
breakdown here.) To paraphrase Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D.--Ill.),
with Democrats like these, who needs Republicans?

Well, service-minded young adults and fans of public
media don't. House Republicans are pushing to eliminate funding for
AmeriCorps and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, along with other deep
cuts that far surpass what President Obama proposes. The
two plans are for separate budget processes--the GOP is tackling the 2011 budget, which Congress still needs
to pass if we're going to continue having a government this year--but
the politics are densely intertwined.

While the Republicans have struggled to get on the same page,
they're united in criticizing the president's proposal: along
with not cutting enough, Obama ignores ballooning entitlement costs--and he loves taxes. The latter point is just
their facts-be-damned insistence that the only way to balance a budget is to
spend less, not take in more. (Love it or hate it, small-government ideology is
no substitute for math.) But on entitlements the Republicans have a point:
Obama declined to address Social Security and Medicare; it's more strategic to
leave this for later negotiations. Add to this his acceptance
of the bloated-military status quo, and it's hard to come up with big-time
spending cuts without taking the Republicans' scorched-earth approach.