Reagan redux

But try to enumerate those promises as we wait for the new budget he is about to release.

We are going to get serious about “health care reform” – a process that initially, his budget director told me, is going to cost money before it has a chance (but not a certainty) of saving any. We are going to get our college-graduation rates back up to world-leading levels by 2020. We are going to find a cure for cancer.

And more. We will “double the supply of renewable energy in the next three years.” Soon we will lay “thousands of miles of new power lines.” We will make sure “every child has access to a complete and competitive education from the day they are born to the day they begin a career.” We are going to create a “retooled, re-imagined auto industry that can compete and win.” Government will “save or create” 3.5 million jobs in the next two years.

And then there is the ever-growing economic rescue plan.

Almost in passing, Obama dropped some news into the speech on the bank-rescue front. Even though Congress already has voted $700 billion to shore up the credit system, the rescue “probably” will require “more than we have already set aside.” Given the continued deterioration of global banks and bad actors such as AIG, we could be talking hundreds of billions more.

We will soon find out how President Obama proposes to do all of this without making theoretical national bankruptcy a reality.

The fact is, our indebtedness is reaching levels unseen since World War II, but unlike then, we are not the sole manufacturing and marketing power in the free world. We have competition.

We are the world’s “reserve” trading currency, the rise of the euro and the yen notwithstanding. The experts that I talk to say the basic problem is not that there are too many dollars in the world, but that no one in the private sector is willing to invest them — so Washington has to print more and spend them on its own.

Can that process continue indefinitely? I don’t think so.

And I bet that Barack Obama doesn’t really think so either.

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