If this budget is a statement of fiscal priorities, Democrats have a lot of explaining to do. Because in assuming the expiration of every measure of tax relief we secured over the past six years, they're opening the door to a series of tax hikes that no rational economy can endure, and no reasonable citizen should tolerate.
Take, for example, a line in the code allowing many of our nation's veterans and war fighters to collect the earned income tax credit. Under their proposal, these men and women who served our nation in uniform would no longer be eligible for relief.
And then there are the accommodations made for our nation's teachers and students. If the Democrats' budget becomes law, teachers will no longer be able to write off certain materials for their classroom. And any thought they had of continuing their professional education without the burden of being taxed to do it will be swiftly disabused if this budget finds passage.
Some of these tax increases are unproductive; others are downright bizarre. But the most disappointing thing about this budget - beyond the chimerical "reserve accounts" that don't exist, and the assumption that simply ratcheting up IRS enforcement will solve all our fiscal problems - is that even a most modest attempt at reforming our runaway entitlement system was left on the shelf.
Read this budget from preface to postscript, and you'll find new taxes and an awful lot of new spending. You'll find faulty assumptions and misguided premises. You'll find a house of cards stacked on a bed of worms.
But nowhere in this budget will you find honest answers to honest questions about our future. But in instituting the largest tax increase in American history, what you may just find are the instruments of its undoing.