Obama opens new era of recklessness

The miraculous marketing machine that carried a junior senator into the White House is now at work trying to convince Americans that writing fat checks from an empty Treasury represents a giant step toward fiscal responsibility.

President Barack Obama has sent Congress a $3.6 trillion federal spending plan that outlines his administration's priorities.

It starts out $1.75 trillion in the red, the largest deficit by any measure in the nation's history. But because he's Barack Obama and everything he does must be chiseled in stone and handed down from the mountaintop, he's proclaimed this first budget as ringing in a "New Era of Responsibility."

Call it the Audacity of Hype. The president, casting himself as the somber task master of a frivolous people, is demanding sacrifice of every American. But there's little sacrifice in his budget.

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