Obama's Budget - Budget Office: “We don’t estimate speeches. You can’t assign numbers to air."

Charles Krauthammer gets it right again. Obama, the Democrats and the MSM are again demonizing the Republicans for not getting anything done on the budget and the debt crisis. Ignoring the fact that for two years the Democrats were in control of the Presidency and both houses of Congress, and not once did they pass a budget nor did they legislate any solution to our mushrooming debt crisis. What hypocrites.

Excerpt: Here we go again. An approaching crisis. A looming deadline. Nervous markets. And then, from the miasma of gridlock, rises our president, calling upon those unruly congressional children to quit squabbling, stop kicking the can down the road, and get serious about debt.

This from the man who:

Ignored the debt problem for two years by kicking the can to a commission.

Promptly ignored the commission’s December 2010 report.

Delivered a State of the Union address in January that didn’t even mention the debt until 35 minutes in.

Delivered in February a budget so embarrassing — it actually increased the deficit — that the Democratic-controlled Senate rejected it 97–0.

Took a budget mulligan with his April 13 debt-plan speech. Asked in Congress how this new “budget framework” would affect the actual federal budget, Congressional Budget Office director Doug Elmendorf replied with a devastating “We don’t estimate speeches.” You can’t assign numbers to air.

It’s no mystery what is needed. First, entitlement reform that changes the inflation measure, introduces means testing, then syncs the (lower) Medicare eligibility age with Social Security’s and indexes them both to longevity. And second, real tax reform, both corporate and individual, that eliminates myriad loopholes in return for lower tax rates for everyone.

That’s real debt reduction. Yet even now, we don’t know where the president stands on any of this. Until we do, I’ll follow the Elmendorf Rule: We don’t estimate speeches. Let’s see if Obama can suspend his 2012 electioneering long enough to keep the economy from going over the debt cliff.

Read full Krauthammer report here.