Your taxes will go up

Back during the Presidential campaign, one axiom that came to light is that all of Obama's promises have an expiration date. Well, as Fred Hiatt writes in today's WashPost, Obama's pinky-swear to hold tax hikes to only the "rich" is unsustainable:

The bottom line is this: You cannot run a progressive government of the kind Obama favors by collecting only 18 percent of the gross domestic product in taxes, which has been the norm over the past 40 years. Nor can you increase the tax take to 24.5 percent of GDP -- which is what Obama proposes to be spending in 2019 -- simply by making the rich pay more.

But rather than level with the American people about this, or lay out a plan to raise the needed taxes, the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress are putting the spending pieces of progressive government in place and apparently counting on the tax piece to fall into place later.

All of this spending on top of unsecured spending would have been irresponsible by itself if it wasn't for the fact that the federal government has no intentions of facing the gaping entitlement spending hole we've already dug:

The CBO says that in recent months a dismal outlook has gotten even darker as projected future spending -- particularly on entitlements such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- expands much faster than expected revenue.

When you spend more than you take in, your debt grows. Federal debt held by the public peaked at 113 percent of total GDP right after World War II, when the U.S. government had to spend vast amounts to defeat Germany and Japan. Today, the debt stands at about 41 percent of GDP.

But with the government running trillion-dollar deficits and facing the Baby Boom generation beginning to retire, CBO estimates that the debt will break the previous record by 2026 and hit 200 percent of GDP by 2038.

Let's throw a public pension shortfall on top of all this for good measure. We cannot possibly borrow enough money to pay for everything and we'd need to find the Mother of all Pawnshops to accept Hawaii. Where's the money going to come from? You, my friend, and your kids and grandkids.

Extra - Bloomberg: "California's nightmare will kill Obamanomics." Let's hope so. (H/T Maggie's Farm.)