From last night’s NewsHour.

On President Obama’s proposed budget:

Well, I think this budget is politically and economically risky, and precisely because it doesn’t have enough spending reduction. If you look at what you’ve got, you’ve got about $2 trillion in deficit reduction.
That comes from $1.5 trillion in Iraq and Afghanistan reductions that are largely illusory. They pretend we would have spent $170 billion a year for a long time, and we’re not.
And then a $700 billion increase in revenues from a cap-and-trade program that has never even come close getting through the U.S. Congress. So that’s the deficit reduction, not obvious it’ll come to fruition.
And then the rest is about $1 trillion of tax increases on high-income individuals and businesses to fund $1 trillion in tax cuts that are already on the books from the stimulus bill, with “Making Work Pay,” Earned Income Tax Credit, things like that.
So you’ve got a dynamic where they’re counting on things that are either illusory and hard to make happen politically — cap-and-trade and tax increases — to fund things that are already there. They didn’t cut spending. And that makes all the deficits that are presented best-guess estimates. The risks are all the upside.

On the president’s proposed tax increases:

Putting aside the philosophical differences about using the income tax for redistribution, I think these tax increases run into two problems of logic. The first is that, when this stimulus bill was passed, a lot of the spending occurred past 2010 into 2011, 2012, 2013, and that was defended by saying, “Gee, the economy might still be weak. We can’t possibly stop spending.”
Well, they’re now going to turn around and whack it over the head with a big tax increase. Those two shouldn’t be around at the same — they don’t make any sense.
The second is, our fundamental problem over the long term is spending. And we won’t tax our way out of that problem. There’s no economist who believes we can raise taxes enough to cover our long-term spending bill.
This budget gets us off on the wrong foot, because where it does cut spending, it turns right around and spends it again on something else. It doesn’t on net put any controls on spending. And spending is the ultimate fiscal discipline. That’s what we need.