This morning, Cory Booker offered some high praise for the president to Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer. He criticized the current “ideological” climate of Congress, and said we “need a level of pragmatism back in our politics.” One way to do that, he suggested, would be more fiscal responsibility and attention to the federal government’s deficit, singling out President Obama as a model on this issue.

Booker specifically said that he is happy the president has acknowledged that “we can’t continue to spend more than we take in,” a luxury that Booker explained he doesn’t have as a mayor. This seems like a rather odd assertion, since the president’s budget proposals will, in fact, never come close to balancing — and will actually open the deficit wider over time:

The House Republican budgets over the past few years, meanwhile, actually do commit to ensuring that the U.S., eventually, stops spending more than it takes in (by about 2030 or 2040), and the House GOP has promised that its 2014 budget would actually balance within ten years. Many economists (not to mention politicians) don’t believe that a government ever necessarily needs to balance its budget (and indeed, because of economic growth, debt levels can be stabilized and reduced without ever running a balanced budget or a surplus), but nonetheless, Booker can hardly pretend that the president has made it any priority to stop spending more than we take in.