President Obama submitted his budget to Congress today.  In terms of irresponsibility and dishonesty  --  not to mention adding to the national debt  --  it breaks all previous records.  The deficit for the upcoming year is projected to be over one and a-half trillion dollars.  The Wall Street Journal delivers the gruesome details here.

The President has proclaimed that his budget is a blueprint for "fiscal restraint," (I'm not making this up) in that it announces a three-year freeze on some discretionary spending.  But the "restraint" is a fraud even if taken at face value.  Discretionary spending accounts for about 17% of the budget. This means that 83%, consisting mostly of welfare state and nanny state entitlements, will go unrestrained.  (Not that discretionary spending will actually get restrained either, once Congress gets into the act).

The relevance of this to criminal law is plain enough.   As the explosion in entitlement spending continues unchecked, there will be increasing and, unfortunately, increasingly heeded calls to cut back on imprisonment and the death penalty (as Kent noted yesterday).  As ever, those calls will focus only on the dollars supposedly to be saved while ignoring the safety certainly to be lost.  They will turn a blind eye to future victims.  They will ignore not only the human but the fiscal costs of increased recidivism.  They will whistle past the real cause of the deficit in favor of a phony remedy.  And they will debase the punishments a society with moral confidence rightly imposes on its most dangerous actors.