This report tells us that economists have “scoffed” at Obama’s budget assumptions:

“If they keep playing this game, they’re going to have real credibility problems,” predicted Brian Bethune, the chief U.S. financial economist at IHS Global Insight, an economic research firm.

[ . . .]

The biggest discrepancy involves unemployment, which reached 8.9 percent last month. The White House sees the number declining to an average of 7.9 percent next year, well below the CBO’s 9 percent estimate and the blue chip 9.5 percent.’The (Obama) unemployment number is crazy,’ said Roberton Williams, senior fellow at the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center.

[. . .]

“Even using their . . . economic assumptions — which now appear to be out of date and overly optimistic — the administration never puts us on a stable path,” said Marc Goldwein, the policy director of the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

When you look at these numbers and yesterday’s healthcare showmanship you get the sense that the Obama team has political plans — for attacking the other side, putting on press conferences and getting Democratic votes — but no substantive approach on the policy side to resolve the difficult problems we face. Frankly, these are smart people so they must understand that they haven’t begun to pay for any of this. And by being so extraordinarily dishonest with voters, they are only making the day of reckoning that much more difficult.

Rick Klein at The Note put it this way:

Can the game have really changed if we’re still playing the same game? The Obama White House has again shown it knows how to make a splash — even though we’re not sure yet exactly what’s in the pool at this watershed. (What’s better — a budget with no numbers, or a healthcare plan with no plans?) So far, President Obama has found perceptions to be easier to manage than realities. You want fiscal discipline? The deficit just grew by more than those proposed budget savings. Economic recovery? Jobs are already being created by the stimulus — still not nearly as fast as they’re being lost, mind you. Healthcare reform? We’ll always have that photo-op . . . (And if Team Obama really had much more than that right now, might we be getting it?)

I don’t know how the Obama team intends to avoid the inevitable math. It is one thing to convince huge Democratic majorities to vote for cotton candy budgets and fantasyland healthcare ( by saying it all pays for itself). But after the photo ops and dog-and-pony summits this will entail governing. You have to pay for it, and you have to eventually face the music. One senses the Obama team has no idea how and when they’re going to do all that.