Obama’s budget proposal is a remarkably weak and timid document. He proposes to cut only $1.1 trillion from federal deficits over the next decade – a pittance when you consider that the deficit this year alone is in the neighborhood of $1.5 trillion. The president makes no serious attempt at cutting entitlement programs that threaten to drive the government into insolvency.

Contrast that with the proposal by the heads of Obama’s fiscal commission, who outlined a way to cut $4 trillion from deficits through 2020, rein in entitlement spending, overhaul the tax code and reduce the government’s debt load. As commission co-chair Erskine Bowles, former chief of staff in Bill Clinton’s White House, told The Post’s Lori Montgomery, Obama’s budget is “nowhere near where they will have to go to resolve our fiscal nightmare.”

The best explanation the White House has come up with, uttered privately, is that Obama didn’t want to step out too far with politically unpopular cuts before congressional Republicans propose their own. And it’s true that Republicans haven’t yet committed to including entitlement reforms in their own 2012 budget. But even that doesn’t justify Obama’s feeble budget document, which squanders the little momentum built up by the fiscal commission.