Obama's numbers just don't add up

I've been observing for some months now that Barack Obama, while insisting he's going to balance the budget, is promising to spend far more money than he can actually come up with sources for.

Here's what Obama says:

Obama also made his own stunning claim on spending: That all of his promises on energy, health care and education are paid for with his budget cuts.

"I'm cutting more than I am spending, so that it will be a net spending cut," Obama said.

CBS News analyzes the reality of the Obama infomercial here.  According to CBS, Obama's budget numbers come up about $90 billion short — and that's using their estimate of $60 billion of lost tax revenue.  Use Obama's higher number of a $130 billion reduction in income tax revenue, and that budget shortfall jumps to $160 billion.  His claim to balance the budget seems to be based in the idea that, unable to decide whether to spend the $90 billion he hopes to save by leaving Iraq on roads, teachers or schools, he can simply spend it on all of them.  The problem with this idea is that to make it work, he has to spend that $90 billion more than once.

At that, it's unclear whether CBS included Obama's promised stimulus package in their numbers, as Obama didn't mention it in his infomercial.  That's another $188 billion there.  (Or has he quietly dropped his stimulus-package promise, hoping no-one will notice?)

Barack Obama is big on talking about change.  I've yet to see any clear explanation of what he proposes that change will be, unless he means he's not a Republican.  His budget plan looks no different from anyone else's — it's full of unfunded promises that he can't deliver on without ballooning the debt even further.  Not that McCain's significantly better; the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that Obama will increase the Federal deficit — not the debt, mind you, just the annual deficit, already sitting at $400 billion — by $281 billion over four years, while McCain's stated plan increases it by $215 billion.  (The first article linked above mentions some of the holes in McCain's fiscal plans.)  Neither of those plans take into account that the federal government just assumed about a trillion dollars in new liabilities.

I don't see the change.  We're being asked to exchange Republican-business-as-usual for Democratic-business-as-usual.  We're not getting any realistic promise of fiscal responsibility.  We're not getting any promise at all of an end to pork.  We're not getting any promise to stop the continued erosion by the government of civil and Constitutional rights in the name of security.  And both candidates are slinging the same old mud and FUD.

I don't see a change here.  It's just another empty slogan.  Swapping Republican for Democrat isn't a change.  It's just the other side of the same coin.

So what WOULD be "real change"?

Well, let's see.

• Congress could start actually representing us, instead of lining their pockets and their friends' pockets and then handing us the bill.  At least acting like they think the law applies to them as well as to us would be a good start, too.
• Maybe when they get over that difficult and painful obstacle, they could start obeying the Constitutional limits on their own authority again.
• We could stop rewarding the financial sector for behavior that would get us, as individuals, thrown in jail or homeless with our future wages garnished for the rest of our lives.
• We could even make economic plans that aren't based on pretending that infinite economic growth forever is a good idea, or even possible in a finite world.
• We could get serious about trying to make the US independent of foreign oil, instead of fighting wars to ensure our continued future access to it, and stop funding foreign governments that hate us but love our money.
• For that matter, we could get serious about renewable, non-polluting energy sources, and stop winking and talking about "clean coal" as though it's not an oxymoron.
• We could stop coming up with movie-plot threat after movie-plot threat to justify taking away our own freedom in order to stop terrorists from taking it away.
• How's this for a really wild idea:  We could, like, actually respect each other's rights and work together to defend everyone's, instead of dividing into opposing camps that each fight to restrict or destroy the other's (but how dare you even think of touching ours!).
• While we're at it, maybe we could even toss out the absurd idea that it's even possible (let alone a good idea) to eliminate all possible risks and hazards from life from the cradle to the grave.  And hey, perhaps we could even ditch the equally stupid idea that there exists some kind of natural right never to be offended (but it's OK to offend other people in the pursuit thereof, because, well, we're Good People, so if anything we do offends them, they must be Bad People, right?).
• On yeah, and that retarded "zero tolerance" shit?  Right OUT, buddy.  Zero tolerance is an excuse not to have to think or accept responsibility for anything — you can just point at the rulebook and say "Don't blame me, the policy did it!"
• You know ... this is a radical concept, but maybe we could, y'know, like, work on the idea of personal responsibility in general, instead of trying to make everything somebody else's fault or somebody else's responsibility?
• In a related vein, we could perhaps work on internalizing the idea that just because we choose to live by a particular ideology doesn't mean everyone else has to, and that we can't expect them to respect ours if we don't respect theirs.

There's a few suggestions to toss out.  Anyone else have more?