Obama submits budget blueprint
(CNN) — President Obama on Thursday presented a budget that he said is an “honest accounting of where we are and where we intend to go.”President Obama says he can halve the deficit by 2013.
Congress received a 140-page summary of the budget Thursday morning. The full details are expected in April.
In introducing the budget, Obama slammed what he called a “dishonest accounting” in regard to the costs of war, and reiterated his commitment to make government “more open and transparent.”
“For too long, our budget has not told the whole truth about how precious tax dollars are spent,” he said.
“Large sums have been left off the books, including the true cost of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. And that kind of dishonest accounting is not how you run your family budgets at home; it’s not how your government should run its budgets either.”
The president said his budget includes investments in renewable energy, education, and health care — priorities he outlined during his address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday.
Despite an ambitious agenda that requires “significant resources,” Obama aims to halve the $1.3 trillion deficit by 2013.
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“While we must add to our deficits in the short term to provide immediate relief to families and get our economy moving, it is only by restoring fiscal discipline over the long run that we can produce sustained growth and shared prosperity,” Obama said.
“And that is precisely the purpose of the budget that I’m submitting to Congress today,” he said.
The president says his team has already identified $2 trillion in budget savings by scouring the federal budget.
Obama said the country will save billions of dollars by rolling back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, “while giving a middle class tax cut to 95 percent of hard-working families.”
Obama warned Thursday that there will be “some hard choices that lie ahead.”
A list of some of the proposed spending cuts obtained by CNN shows that the programs on the chopping block range from outdated farm subsidy programs to pricey Pentagon weapons programs and the so-called “carried-interest” loophole on Wall Street.
Each program, however, has political patrons on Capitol Hill who will fight to save the budget items, setting the stage for major political battles as the details of the budget are debated by lawmakers in the months ahead.
One high-profile proposal involves closing the loophole that has allowed some Wall Street investment managers to pay lower tax rates than their low-paid assistants. Wall Street lobbyists have fought such changes in the past and won, but the current political environment is so sour on financial executives that the proposal could garner more support now.
On agriculture, the Obama administration is aiming to save $9.8 billion over 10 years by phasing out direct payments to farmers with sales revenues of $500,000 or more per year. The list of spending cuts claims that “about 25 percent of direct payments go to farmers with farm sales (revenue) of greater than $500,000.”
On education, the administration is considering elimination of the Federal Mentoring Program created by the previous Bush administration to save nearly $50 million.
On defense, the administration’s list suggests it will target expensive weapons systems but does not specify which programs will be cut or how much money will be saved. White House officials said they are letting Defense Secretary Robert Gates take the lead on specific announcements Thursday.
The list did contend the Pentagon’s new weapons programs are “among the largest, most expensive, and technically difficult that the Department has ever tried to develop. Consequently, they carry a high risk of performance failure, cost increases and schedule delays.”
Obama is asking Congress for more than $200 billion to fund U.S. war efforts for the next year and a half, according to defense officials.
The request will be for $75.5 billion for 2009 to cover the cost of sending more troops to Afghanistan this year and an additional $130 billion for fiscal year 2010, according to the sources.
War spending for 2010 will be part of the president’s overall defense funding request. The money will be in addition to $534 billion for the U.S. Defense Department’s other expenditures, which the president is expected to request from Congress.
Congress gave the Pentagon $65.9 billion for the first half of fiscal 2009.
Obama is also proposing a $634 billion health care “reserve fund” aimed at reforming the system, according to senior administration officials. In order to fund it, Obama will ask wealthy Americans to deal with a tax increase and wealthy seniors to pay higher Medicare premiums.
The reserve fund will essentially be a piggy bank to be used only for reforming the system by cutting costs and trying to deal with the 46 million Americans without health insurance.
Rep. John Boehner, the House minority leader, questioned Obama’s proposal to fund health care.
“Everyone agrees that all Americans deserve access to affordable health care, but is increasing taxes during an economic recession, especially on small businesses, the right way to accomplish that goal?” he asked.
The budget will leave the actual details of how to reform the system to be worked out by Congress, and top Obama officials are already acknowledging this is only a start — it will take more money to get the job done.
“This is a substantial down payment for health-care reform,” one senior administration official said of the president’s plan.
Source:cnn