The White House is focusing on re-election themes such as jobs and public works projects in President Barack Obama's new budget blueprint, while relying on familiar but never enacted tax increases on the wealthy and corporations to reduce future deficits after four years of trillion dollar-plus shortfalls.
Obama's 2013 budget, set for release Monday, is the official start to an election-year budget battle with Republicans. It's unlikely to result in a genuine effort to address the $15 trillion national debt or the entrenched deficits that keep piling on to it. But it will serve as the Democrats' party-defining template on this year's election stakes.
The president's plan is laden with stimulus-style initiatives: sharp increases for highway construction and school modernization, and a new tax credit for businesses that add jobs. But it avoids sacrifice with only minimal curbs on the unsustainable growth of Medicare, even as it proposes a 10-year, $61 billion "financial crisis responsibility fee" on big banks to recoup the 2008 Wall Street bailout.
This budget plan, administration officials say, borrows heavily from Obama's recommendations in September to a congressional deficit "supercommittee" that was assigned to come up with at least $1.2 trillion in deficit savings as part of last summer's default-avoiding budget and debt pact. The panel deadlocked and left Washington to struggle with bruising, across-the-board spending cuts that kick in next January.
The president's budget plan predicts a deficit of $1.3 trillion for 2012 and a $901 billion deficit in the 2013 budget year, which starts Oct. 1. It claims deficit savings of more than $4 trillion over a decade, mixing $1 trillion already banked through last summer's clampdown on agency operating budgets with $1.5 trillion in higher tax revenues reaped from an overhaul of the tax code.
An additional $1 trillion, more or less, would come from war savings, a move that budget watchdogs call an accounting gimmick, especially because the administration also wants to devote some of those savings to pay for $476 billion in road and bridge projects over the coming six years.
The budget also futilely asks Congress to adopt a "Buffett Rule," guaranteeing that households with a yearly income of more $1 million pay federal taxes equal to at least 30 percent of it. Billionaire financier Warren Buffett has made headlines proposing the idea, saying that it's unfair for him to pay a lower tax rate than his secretary.
Republicans say the new tax would push investors into sending money overseas, where it would be taxed less. Recycled proposals to curb tax breaks for oil and gas producers are also a dead letter on Capitol Hill.
Obama planned to promote the budget at a campaign-style appearance Monday in the Virginia suburbs. The White House is delaying its release until the president's appearance.
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