By Christina Sun

On Feb. 1, Obama presented his $3.8 trillion budget proposal for the next decade. The deficit will hit a post-WWII record high this fiscal year at $1.6 trillion. The budget is supposed to save $1.2 trillion over the next decade, but this savings becomes nearly meaningless when compared to the $6 trillion debt that is supposed to accrue in the next 10 years.

Obama’s big effort to to reduce spending is to freeze some domestic spending for three years. Sounds great on the surface until you read the fine print. The freeze exempts spending on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, spending by the Pentagon, the budgets of the Veterans Administration and Department of Homeland Security. Also, this spending freeze would not impact the mandatory spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. These three programs account for 59 percent of all federal spending.

So in essence, the three-year spending freeze is completely irrelevant.

To make the spending freeze even more insignificant, according to the Office of Management and Budget’s numbers, the baseline discretionary domestic spending has been increased by $115 billion since Obama’s inauguration. Great place to freeze spending, if you ask me.

Even with all this, you would think that the administration would actually attempt to decrease spending in the non-security, discretionary domestic arena. However, in the budget, education, civilian research, food and drug safety and biomedical research would all get more money. NASA would be granted $18 billion to spend on new technologies that could take humans farther into space. The Department of Health and Human Services would see an increase in their budget of $1.7 billion to $81.3 billion. The National Institute of Health’s budget would see an increase of $1 billion, to $32 billion. Cutbacks, you say?

The focus of the administration should be on fiscal responsibility. Social Security will be bankrupt by the year 2017 and Medicare will be bankrupt by 2037 if nothing is done to reform these programs. There cannot be a significant reduction in the federal deficit without attention to these huge entitlement programs.

Pork-barrel spending pervades the federal budget. Currently, the Senate and House Appropriations Committee members are so protective of their own interests that there is no chance for cutting excess pork. We need to grant the president the power of the line-item veto so that waste can be cut from the budget.

We are borrowing heavily from China and other countries, and by 2020, our debt will be 77 percent of the gross domestic product. Frightening.