Robert Reich argues that the president really isn’t in favor of big government. That’s just perposterous. Stephen Moore explains:

Here are the unhappy totals: the debt is $6 trillion higher from 2010 to 2019 than Obama’s forecast. In no single year over the next decade, even when counting the Social Security trust fund surpluses, does the budget deficit fall below $800 billion. The interest on the national debt rises to $850 billion a year by the middle of the next decade, which will be the largest single expenditure item in the budget–eight times more than we now spend on education and four times more than we spend on homeland security. Federal spending remains well over 25 percent of GDP and in some years creeps closer to 28 percent of GDP under the Obama budget, which ironically enough is entitled “A New Era of Responsibility.”

We are closing in on stagnant Western European levels of government intrusion into the economy. That economic model, by the way, which the left in the United States openly wants to emulate, has created half the jobs that the United States has over the past two decades and generated half the growth rates. Is it any wonder that the Chinese want an extra guarantee on U.S. Treasury debt and say it might be time for a new reserve currency?

(And Moore argues persuasively that the actual numbers will be even worse, given the phony baloney assumptions built into the Obama budgeting.)

Aside from the size of the federal government Obama favors,  one can’t avoid the scope of its reach: cap-and-trade regulation for every business, national healthcare for all its citizens, Geithner/Bernanke’s empowerment to seize “failing” businesses at will, regulation of executive compensation, cradle to employment education, and on and on it goes. Really, do Reich and Obama think we don’t notice the largest expansion of the public sector since, well, ever?

Understandably it’s not popular — still — to say you favor big (really, gargantuan) government. But to deny it amid such a massive plot to expand the public sector suggests a lack of respect for the intelligence of the American people.