I’m sorry, but weren’t we conservatives engaging in the “politics of fear” when we warned that higher taxes would be forthcoming under a President Obama? Wasn’t it all just a distraction from the “real issues” when we brought up what was actually, you know, a real issue?

As predicted, Obama intends to raise taxes on businesses and cut defense spending, even while increasing troops levels in Afghanistan, in order to cut the budget deficit. You know, the same deficit he just enlarged with his untargeted, untimely trillion-dollar porkulus.

President Obama is putting the finishing touches on an ambitious first budget that seeks to cut the federal deficit in half over the next four years, primarily by raising taxes on business and the wealthy and by slashing spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, administration officials said…

In his weekly radio and Internet address today, Obama expressed determination to “get exploding deficits under control” and described his budget request as “sober in its assessments, honest in its accounting, and lays out in detail my strategy for investing in what we need, cutting what we don’t, and restoring fiscal discipline.”

For the record, $500,000 for a dog park in California is “what we need”, right? How about a $600 million “heritage trail” in Mississippi? Yeah, that’s an important expenditure when we’re talking about cutting defense spending.

To get there, Obama proposes to cut spending and raise taxes. The savings would come primarily from “winding down the war” in Iraq, a senior administration official said. The budget assumes that the nation will continue to spend money on “overseas military contingency operations” throughout Obama’s presidency, the official said, but that number is significantly lower than the nearly $190 billion the nation budgeted for Iraq and Afghanistan last year.

Yes, even as Obama has pledged to ratchet up the war in Afghanistan and widen the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, he’s going to cut the DoD’s budget. Brilliant.

Obama also seeks to increase tax collections, primarily by making good on his promise to eliminate the temporary tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 for wealthy taxpayers, whom Obama defined during the campaign as those earning more than $250,000 a year. Those tax breaks would be permitted to expire on schedule for the 2011 tax year, when the top tax rate would rise from 35 percent to more than 39 percent.

Obama also proposes to maintain the tax on estates worth more than $3.5 million, instead of letting it expire next year. And he proposes “a fairly aggressive effort on tax enforcement” that would target tax havens and corporate loopholes, among other provisions, the official said.

So here’s his brilliant strategy: We’re in the middle of a deep recession that he’s warning a bad move could plunge us into for eternity, right? Right. So let’s raise taxes on the people who will invest and spend. This way they have less money and…we’re even more screwed. Even the Washington Compost concedes that non-partisan observers “question the wisdom of announcing a plan to raise taxes in the midst of a recession”. Duh.

Is anyone surprised here? A Chicago liberal was elected to the White House. How predictable can it be that he’ll cut spending on defense, pursue his socialized health care plans, and raise taxes? The American people get what they voted for. And if when the tax hikes make the recession worse, oh well. Don’t put Chicago tax-and-pork-spend liberals in the White House.