In all of his State of the Union addresses, President Obama advocated reducing the federal deficit and debt. In practice, he has grown them.

In 2009, he set a goal: “And yesterday I held a fiscal summit where I pledged to cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term in office,” he said. He has since ignored it.

In 2010, he pledged to create a bipartisan fiscal commission to cut the deficit “because I refuse to pass this problem on to another generation of Americans.” He left its recommendations out of his next budget.

In 2011, he said he would even be willing to reform entitlement programs to bring down the debt. He didn’t.

This year, he said, “When it comes to the deficit, we’ve already agreed to more than $2 trillion in cuts and savings.” Three years after pledging to halve the deficit by the end of his first term, the only progress he could cite is that he’s “agreed to” trim spending. By the end of last summer, the federal debt had grown under President Obama by $4 trillion. “It’s the most rapid increase in the debt under any U.S. President,” CBS News reported.

The Congressional Budget Office analysis of Obama’s 2012 budget proposal reached this conclusion: “In all, deficits would total $9.5 trillion between 2012 and 2021 under the President’s budget (or 4.8 percent of total GDP projected for that period) — $2.7 trillion more than the cumulative deficit in CBO’s baseline. Federal debt held by the public would double under the President’s budget, growing from $10.4 trillion (69 percent of GDP) at the end of 2011 to $20.8 trillion (87 percent of GDP) at the end of 2021.”

The President has feigned concern about the deficit and debt while deliberately increasing both. For a President who campaigned on ending business as usual in Washington, he certainly learned quickly how to practice it.