The Democrats' lost sense of balance when it comes to budget

IBD:

The Democrats' latest tactic to impose massive tax hikes is to argue that we need a "balanced approach" to debt-reduction. Don't buy it. Our debt crisis is entirely the result of too much spending, not too little taxing.

The new favorite phrase among Democrats these days is: "balanced approach." They love it so much, they use it every time they talk about cutting the nation's debt burden. As in: "We obviously believe a balanced approach is the right approach," in the words of White House Press Secretary Jay Carney. Or "we are trying to find a balanced approach," as Rep. Nancy Pelosi said last week.

President Obama set the term in motion in April when he claimed he was offering "a balanced approach that looks at the entire budget for savings, and asks everyone to do their part to restore fiscal responsibility."

It's all about fairness, you see. As Vice President Joe Biden put it over the weekend: "We're never going to solve our debt problem if we ask only those who are struggling in this economy to bear the burden and let the most fortunate among us off the hook."

Lest there be any doubt, what Democrats are talking about is a massive tax hike. They want to hike taxes on the so-called rich and oil companies. They want a $72 billion tax hike on businesses by ending the "last-in-first-out" method of accounting for inventory costs. You get the idea.

The implicit message, of course, is that Republicans want an unbalanced approach, one that favors the rich at the expense of the poor and middle class. Biden went so far as to say that the GOP's refusal to consider tax hikes "borders on the immoral."

But even if raising taxes on business and the most productive elements of society makes sense at a time when the economy is still struggling to find its feet — which it most emphatically doesn't — the simple fact is tax hikes fail to address the real cause of the debt crisis: out-of-control federal spending.

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The Democrat spin on the deficit is surreal. It makes you think they deliberately ran up the deficit to have an excuse to raise taxes which is what they wanted to begin with. Republicans should not fall for this trap.  The chart above was with the original piece.