The Washington Post reports:

President Obama will make reforming the U.S. health-care system his top fiscal priority this year, administration officials said yesterday, contending that reining in skyrocketing medical costs is critical to saving the nation from bankruptcy.

At a summit on “fiscal responsibility” convened by the White House, top administration officials said they also are committed to stabilizing the Social Security system and to revising a tax code that generates too little money to cover the cost of government.

But the White House offered no timetable for those goals and few explicit ideas for how to achieve them, disappointing some lawmakers and other participants who had hoped the summit might produce greater momentum to fix the chronic imbalance between government spending and tax collections that is driving the national debt to dangerous levels.

Only a month into the Obama administration we have reached the point at which words have lost their ordinary meaning and there is no shame in making the most brazenly hypocritical pronouncements. Let’s start from the top. “Reforming” heath care does not, I guarantee you, mean the government will spend less money. It might seem like that’s the case since the president is bringing it up in the context of fiscal responsibility. But who among us thinks Obama intends to cut government outlays for healthcare? He wants, among other things, to cover more people, spend money to undertake a massive comparison between different treatment options, and convert paper records to a uniform electronic system. You can quibble about whether these are wise things to do, but they are incontrovertibly expensive things.

Next we have the summit itself,  at which the trillion dollar deficit creators declare themselves to be mightily concerned about this horrible deficit. Either they aren’t supposed to be concerned about such things (because Keynes says it will all work out through the magic of the multiplier effect) or we are supposed to be terribly worried — in which case we spent way too much money two weeks ago on a bunch of junky projects. As for the looming cost of entitlements, once again we see no evidence that the Obama administration has any interest in controlling outlays. And then the very next day we see that the Obama administration is releasing a $410B omnibus spending bill:

The omnibus package, which would cut funding for some Bush administration priorities, would raise overall spending by 8.7% from 2008. Some Republicans immediately criticized the bill as “out-of-control spending,” but it appeared unlikely to face serious resistance in Congress.

So, the entire summit was a poorly conceived charade. The unintentional hilarity is buried a number of paragraphs down  in the Post’s report which acknowledges that “with this year’s deficit projected to approach a record $1.5 trillion, Obama said he would reduce the budget gap to $533 billion by the end of his first term in office.” Let me think about this. Couldn’t we have shrunk it a lot more than that without Nancy Pelosi’s trillion dollar pork-a-thon? And imagine what we’d be able to accomplish with a much reduced omnibus spending package.

For an administration supposedly filled with such serious intellectual giants this is embarrassing stuff indeed. It’s one thing to run up the tab and pronounce that a trillion dollar deficit is no immediate danger to us. But it’s quite another to hold a confab feigning concern about the budgetary mess you have just exacerbated — and then bust the budget the very next day.