Following up on yesterday's post, President Obama's Budget Contains $1.9 Trillion in Tax Increases: editorial in today's Wall Street Journal, The President's Priorities:

One rule of budget reporting is to watch what the politicians are spending this year, not the frugality they promise down the road. By that measure, the budget that President Obama released yesterday for fiscal 2011 is one of the greatest spend-while-you-can documents in American history. …

All of this spending must be financed, and so deficits and taxes are both scheduled to rise to record levels. … [T]he reality is that even these still-high deficits are based on assumptions for growth and revenue gains from record tax increases starting January 1, 2011. And what a list of tax increases it is—no less than $2 trillion worth over the decade. The nearby table lists some of the largest, all of which the Administration and its economists claim to believe will have little or no impact on growth. If they're wrong, the deficits will be even larger.

Our favorite euphemism is the Administration's estimate that it can get $122.2 billion in new revenue via a "reform" of the "U.S. international tax system." Reform usually means closing some loopholes in return for lower tax rates. But this is a giant tax increase on American companies that operate overseas, and it includes no offsetting cut in the U.S. 35% corporate tax rate, which is among the highest in the world. The Administration agreed last year to drop this idea when it was seeking the help of the Business Roundtable to pass health care. But so much for that, now that the White House needs the money.