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What Do You Call An Obama Budget That's Dead Long Before Arrival?

This article is more than 8 years old.

All you need to know about the prospects for the Obama fiscal 2017 budget that will be released this week is the following: it’s the last budget from a lame duck Democratic White House being sent to a Republican-controlled Congress that’s openly hostile to this president.

And it includes what some are calling a tax increase.

But even though it clearly will be “dead on arrival,” you shouldn’t call the Obama 2017 budget DOA because that label understates how lifeless it will really be.

In what might have been unprecedented announcement in the 42-year history of the congressional budget process, the chairmen of the House and Senate Budget Committee’s made it clear last week that they had no plans to hold any hearings on what Obama proposes. They essentially announced that the president’s 2017 budget is and will continue to be irrelevant.

(For the record, then-incoming House Budget Committee Chairman John Kasich (R-OH) said in 1994 that President Bill Clinton shouldn’t bother submitting a budget because it would be irrelevant to what the just-elected Republican majority was planning to do. Kasich then waited for the Clinton budget to be submitted and his committee held hearings on it anyway.)

But it isn’t just nonexistent congressional interest in what the president will propose that is making the Obama budget dead; interest in it outside the beltway will be almost as limited.

Given that the Obama budget will be submitted to Congress the same day as the New Hampshire presidential primary and that the results of that voting will be of far greater interest to most people, the amount of coverage of the president’s budget by the mainstream media will be far less than what has been typical in the past.

And no congressional hearings after the budget is released will deprive the White House of headlines and stories the rest of the week even though front-page coverage of news from New Hampshire will mostly change to commentary and analysis that takes up less inches and fewer minutes.

As I said in my previous post, this is why the Obama 2017 budget will be almost completely forgotten by the end of the week. What in the past might have been the topic for the Sunday political talk shows will be nothing more than a brief mention after a long conversation about the New Hampshire primary results and a discussion of this year’s best Super Bowl commercials.

The White House intensified the DOA nature of its soon-to-be-released budget last week when it announced its plan to impose a $10-a-barrell oil tax to pay for additional spending on infrastructure and transportation. Congressional Republicans immediately labeled this as a politically toxic “tax increase” and declared it...and the budget that includes it…to be a nonstarter.

So how should you refer to the 2017 Obama budget that will be dead long before it ever arrives on Capital Hill?

“Dead Before Arrival” (DBA) is too procedural and not a real indication of what’s happening. Using it would be the fiscal equivalent of describing a bagel as a bread donut.

“Dead Before Printing” (DBP) doesn’t work as well these days as it might have in the past because more people read the federal budget online than ever before. DBP might work better if it stands for “Dead Before Pixels,” but that still isn’t really descriptive enough.

And if DBP doesn’t work, “Dead Before Typesetting” (DBT) would be a complete anachronism about which millennial budget analyst and observers would have absolutely no clue.

That points to just one thing to describe the Obama 2017 budget: JD, or “Just Dead.”