Our transformative president, Barack Obama, has loaded his 2011 budget proposal with a lot of trailblazing ideas - well, trailblazing for the 1930s. He's raising all sorts of taxes and cutting a few - a very few - no doubt to provide a fig leaf of cover when critics hang the bigger tax increases around his neck.

Ditto spending. While hiking government spending to unprecedented levels ($3.83 trillion), the president is offering to freeze or cut a relative handful of programs. That way, in the unabashed style of the accomplished scammer-politician, Mr. Obama can then make the case that his green eyeshades are greener than any Republican's.

According to Bloomberg.com, Mr. Obama and his band of retro-fashion New Dealers plan to increase taxes by the staggering sum of $1.9 trillion dollars over the next decade - on the rich and businesses, of course, and through various gimmicks and jiggering of tax laws, when necessary.

A recently self-proclaimed non-ideologue, Mr. Obama knows in his heart or hearts that sucking nearly $2 trillion dollars from the productive sector of the economy won't in any way adversely impact 1) investment; 2) capital formation; 3) business startups and expansion; and 4) job creation. And more onerous business regulations and red tape can't possibly serve as a dragline in getting the economy up and running.

Crashing up through the roof on spending, debt (the national debt ceiling now stands at $14.29 trillion), deficits, borrowing and money printing, along with huge tax hikes, will make Reagan's revitalization of the economy and the long run of prosperity that followed seem like a temporary blip.

Someone might want to get a copy of Amity Shales' The Forgotten Man  to the President, pronto. This very non-ideological president might want to learn what similar policies by FDR did to the American economy in its true lost decade of the 1930s. Or could it be he already knows?