“We can no longer afford to spend as if deficits don’t matter and waste is not our problem,” President Barack Obama told reporters last Thursday. “We can no longer afford to leave the hard choices for the next budget, the next administration or the next generation.”

Therefore, President Obama, with a straight face, proposed cutting $17 billion from the fiscal 2010 budget.

Put $17 billion in context. It is exactly 0.5 percent of the $3.4 trillion budget Congress passed earlier this year. This is the biggest budget of any government in United States and world history, and the president could not cut even 1 percent worth of fat.

Since Congress has already rejected some of Obama’s proposed savings, the actual cuts will be even less.

The fiscal 2010 budget proposes borrowing $1.17 trillion to finance government spending—approximately 30 percent of the budget. But that estimate may prove too low since the government is projecting a quick return to positive economic growth. To meet the Obama administration’s projections, the economy would need to grow in excess of 3 percent next year and 4 percent per year over the longer term. Over the last decade the economy has grown at closer to 2 percent per year—and that includes the boom years of the housing bubble. As of the last quarter, the economy actually contracted at a rate of more than 6 percent.

The 2010 projections will be way off. Yet politicians realize “we can no longer afford to spend as if deficits don’t matter.” Reassuring?

After he was first elected in 2001, former President Bush said, “My budget proposal pays down an unprecedented amount of public debt. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to act now, and I hope you will join me to pay down $2 trillion in debt during the next 10 years. At the end of those 10 years, we will have paid down all the debt that is available to retire. That is more debt repaid more quickly than has ever been repaid by any nation at any time in history.”

But President Bush actually added the most debt by a single president in the history of the nation: $4.9 trillion. The truth is that neither Republicans nor Democrats favor small government or sustainable spending. Both parties are compromised by self-interest groups that happily dole out the campaign contributions and backdoor handouts in order to have a shot at accessing even greater amounts of taxpayer dollars—they are just compromised by different groups.

If President Obama’s projections are correct, he will run up as much debt in four years as President Bush did in eight.

Don’t look for a balanced budget or financial sound-mindedness anytime soon. But, as the consequence of today’s unbalanced budgets, know that taxes will go up, the dollar will go down and your standard of living will be forcefully readjusted—soon.

Read Ron Fraser’s article “Your Standard of Living” to see how this scenario was foretold by Herbert W. Armstrong three decades ago.