Let’s be clear: There have been no spending cuts since Obama became president. In 2010, the first year that President Obama was fully responsible for federal spending (President Obama signed the 2009 budget, but it’s fair to blame most of the spending in it on President Bush, who essentially proposed it), the federal government spent $3.45 trillion. Last year, we spent $3.54 trillion, nearly $100 billion more. And, outlays for the first four months of FY 2013 are $39.3 billion more than in the first four months of FY 2012. If we have seen a slight reduction in budget deficits, it is due exclusively to tax hikes and additional increased revenue as the economy comes out of recession.

And given the presidential wish list, we aren’t going to see any spending cuts anytime soon. The president wants to spend more money on education, infrastructure, “green energy,” manufacturing subsidies, universal preschool, and pretty much everything else. At the same time, the president warned that the upcoming sequester, a 2.4 percent reduction in projected future federal spending, would return us to something akin to the Dark Ages.

In some ways, though, President Obama looks like a model of fiscal rectitude next to congressional Democrats. On Sunday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said, “It is almost a false argument to say we have a spending problem.” And lest anyone think that Pelosi misspoke, her whip, Representative Steny Hoyer, followed Pelosi’s remarks by declaring that we don’t have a spending problem: “The country has a paying‐​for problem. We haven’t paid for what we’ve bought.”

Yet, despite the president’s rhetorical nod to cuts in spending, he, like Pelosi and Hoyer, apparently believes that our real problem is not spending, but the deficit that results from insufficient taxes to pay for that spending — as Hoyer says, “a paying‐​for problem.”

That’s how the president can propose so much new spending while confidently decreeing, “Nothing I’m proposing tonight should increase our deficit by a single dime.” If you raise taxes, then poof — the deficit (and therefore the problem) goes away.

This misses the point. Deficits are merely the symptom of the disease, which is an ever‐​growing government. Consider that the Congressional Budget Office estimates that, even if we never add another new government program, existing commitments will drive federal‐​government spending to 43 percent of GDP by 2050. With state and local government spending, government at all levels will consume roughly two‐​thirds of all the goods and services produced in this country.

Pelosi, Hoyer, and Obama respond to this by suggesting that the only problem is finding enough taxes to pay for all this government. In fairness, if one uses a purely static analysis, eliminating deficit spending and thereby reducing future interest payments would reduce projected future federal spending to just 30 percent of GDP. With state and local government spending, that’s still 45 to 50 percent of GDP.

One wonders, of course, whether even President Obama can raise taxes enough to pay for all this spending. Obama wants to close tax loopholes for the rich, but the two changes that Pelosi mentioned on Sunday — imposing the Buffett Rule (a 30 percent minimum tax on the wealthy who earn their income primarily from investments) and eliminating tax subsidies for the oil‐​and‐​gas industry — would raise a grand total of $85 billion over the next ten years. The president’s favored plan — to cap deductions for couples earning more than $250,000 per year — does somewhat better, generating an additional $584 billion over ten years. On the other hand, that’s less than 10 percent of the cumulative $6.3 trillion in deficits expected over that period.

More important, the president and his allies ignore the dangers that such a gargantuan government poses to both liberty and economic growth. As economists James Gwartney, Robert Lawson, and Randall Holcombe argue: