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This Thursday, House Democratic Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) announced that for the first time since 1974 the House will not consider a budget resolution. An examination of the President’s $3.8 trillion FY2011 budget proposal quickly reveals why House Democrats have no interest in getting near it in an election year. The CBO reported in March that Obama’s budget would nearly triple our national debt by 2020 and requires yearly interest payments that will quadruple to $916 billion.

And now, The Hill reports, a new analysis by the IMF of our nation’s finances revealed the urgent need for leadership that Democrats have not been willing to offer.

The U.S. national debt will soon reach 100% of GDP, the IMF predicts in a new report. . . [and] the U.S. would need to reduce its structural deficit by the equivalent of 12% of GDP, a much larger portion than any other country analyzed except Japan. Greece, in the midst of a financial crisis, needs to reduce its structural deficit by just 9% of GDP, according to the IMF's analysis.

So, as the IMF is sounding the alarm on our unsustainable deficits, the Democrats continue to hit the snooze button by making a purely political calculation to ignore the most basic responsibility of governing. Ironically, the person who should be most ashamed of this failure is Budget Committee Chairman Rep. John Spratt (D-SC), who noted in 2006, “if you can’t budget, you can’t govern.”