President Obama's Unsustainable Budgets

There was another Super Bowl ad that ran; perhaps you caught it. It was for the census. Yes, our government spent 2.5 million taxpayer dollars on a commercial during the Super Bowl. Hey, I don't know about you, but I really am excited to participate in the census now. How about you?

It was only part of the $340 million campaign to promote the once a decade count — $340 million dollars not to count but to promote the fact that we will be counting. And the president has the nerve to lecture America on wasting money?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: When times are tough, you tighten your belts. You don't go buying a boat when you can barely pay your mortgage. You don't blow a bunch of cash in Vegas when you're trying to save for college.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

Do we really have to listen to this president preach to us about fiscal responsibility? It's like an abstinence only sex-education program taught by Tiger Woods.

President Obama is a lot of things — smart, accomplished, married to a woman with great arms — but he's as fiscally responsible as a "Real Housewife of Orange County" at a Louis Vuitton sample sale.

When you look back in history, who do you think of when you think of huge government programs? FDR, right? Let me show you FDR's spending compared to our GDP — high single digits, occasionally getting up to low double digits.

OK, well what is President Obama planning to spend? Take a look.

How is this sustainable? Forget sustainable; how is this sensible? How is this not suicidal?

I can hear his defenders now: "No! Bush is the one responsible! It's his fault!"

Is it? Let's look at the facts for a second. How much debt have the past couple of presidents racked up?

Bill Clinton through his eight years ran up an average of 0.8 percent of GDP in deficit per year. Is that good? Well, not in any context other than government. If your company was losing money like this, you'd be thinking about blowing management out. If your household was losing money like this, you'd be getting an extra job and cancelling the cell phone and pay channels. But in politics, Clinton looks like the most fiscally responsible man in the universe.

(Of course, this was mainly because of the yet to be discovered Internet bubble and the yet to be discovered financial scandals. But honestly, if you want to believe it was because of his magical policies, that's fine with me for the moment.)

Now, let's look at Bush. Here is his number for eight years: 2 percent per year on average. Is that bad? Yes, it sure is. But I can hear those on the left saying: "Well, 2009 was Bush's fault — not Obama's!"

OK, I'm in a giving mood. Let's blame everything from 2009 on Bush. That raises his average to 2.7 percent. We can all agree that this number is unacceptable. Right?

So what about President Obama? Surely, the man who spends all of his time criticizing the last administration must be creating less debt than that irresponsible President Bush did during his presidency, right?

Nope. The average debt in a theoretical eight-year Obama presidency is: 5.9 percent. Remember, this is based on President Obama's budget numbers, not Glenn Beck's crazy opinion.

But hey, that's not fair. We need to eliminate 2009 out of Obama's score because we already gave that to President Bush. Fair enough. (I could mention at this point that Obama voted for TARP, so he's at least partially responsible for that debt too, but that's another story for another day.) If we delete 2009 from the Obama score, it lowers all the way to 5.5 percent — still more than double Bush's average.

But I'm feeling incredibly generous today. Let's just eliminate the debt from 2009 and 2010 from Obama's score. That brings him way down to 4.7 percent.

But hey, only eliminating the entire first half of the first term of his presidency is isn't enough — that must all be Bush's fault too. So let's take away the first three years of the Obama presidency and see what we have: 4.1 percent.

Remember, that's still double what Bush actually did in his eight years in office.

But maybe I'm still being too tough on Obama. Maybe I need to go further than giving him an Immunity Tiki for three quarters of the time he was elected for. Let's go to the most crazy extreme any of us can think of: Let's just look at the best year of Obama's theoretical eight-year presidency. This is as good as it gets, even if he gets elected for two full terms — as optimistic as Obama can bring himself to be, the most hopeful side of hop — 3.6 percent. This — again — is according to Obama's own budget.

Think about that for a second: Even if we give Bush full credit for a disastrous year that he wasn't even in office and for good measure add in Bill Clinton for no reason, their combined total is still less than Obama's best year.

Now, maybe sometimes I over-generalize. I say this stuff has been happening in both parties for a long time and it has. But we've never seen anything like President Obama. His own budget amounts to a confession. He is admitting he can't solve our debt problems with his policies even if he gets re-elected. How many terms would this guy need to get this country out of the red? Five? Twelve? Is there any theoretical point in the distant future where this president doesn't see us hemorrhaging money?

President Obama has broken a lot of promises over his first year: closing Gitmo; health care debate on C-SPAN; no lobbyists serving in his administration. And he's not the only one. George W. Bush promised to decrease the debt — and remember "no new taxes"? They all do it.

But what Obama's budget is telling you right now is that he's promising to keep us at incredibly high levels of debt throughout his presidency. And that is a promise he will keep.

Here's another promise: If this is what he admits to, it's going to be much, much worse.

— Watch "Glenn Beck" weekdays at 5 p.m. ET on Fox News Channel