Americans who have even the slightest notion of the danger posed by a national debt of $12 trillion have to be concerned about President Barack Obama’s $3.8 trillion spending plan for 2011.

It would raise the cumulative debt by another $1.27 trillion, the difference between how much the president proposes to spend and how much the government is expected to take in.

That’s on top of the current year’s record one-year deficit of $1.56 trillion. …

Obama points to the wars in Iraq and the fragile beginnings of economic recovery at home as reasons that the federal government has to continue to borrow. But taxpayers, who have heard one rationale after another, understandably wonder when the excuses will end. …

Obama rightly blamed former President George W. Bush and the Republican-led Congress before 2007 for budget-busting actions, including the off-the-books wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the expensive prescription-drug program for Medicare recipients and tax cuts for the wealthy and middle class. Yet Obama doesn’t propose to anger voters by ending the drug program, and he plans to make permanent the Bush tax cuts …

No task is more important in the long term than balancing the budget. The United States can’t maintain its power in the world nor its standard of living at home if it can’t control its debt.

The Columbus Dispatch,

Feb. 5