President Obama will roll out a $3.7 trillion budget blueprint Monday that would trim or terminate more than 200 federal programs next year and make key investments in education, transportation and research in a bid to boost the nation’s economy and reduce record budget deficits.
Senior administration officials cast the document as a responsible alternative to the deep spending cuts that Republicans will urge in a vote this week on the House floor. Obama’s plan would reduce deficits by more than $1.1 trillion over the next decade, the officials said, with two-thirds of the money coming from spending cuts that would strike hard at programs that Democrats have long favored.
However, the president also will call for targeted investments that would increase funding for energy and medical research, expand the tax credit for corporate research and development, pay to train 100,000 new science and math teachers, and fund a wireless network that would bring high-speed Internet access to 98 percent of Americans.
“The debate in Washington is not whether to cut or to spend. We both agree we should cut,” said a senior administration official, who briefed reporters Sunday night on the condition of anonymity because the budget had not been released. “The question is how we cut and what we cut.”
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Eliminate the DEA and the damn drug war. That should save several tens of billions.
`How many times have we heard that reducing taxes increases revenue? According to this thought, there shouldn’t be any deficit. SINCE there is, I guess that belies the claim of lower taxes stimulating revenue.
Let’s raise taxes to at least the 1980 level. Aaawww forget that, let’s go back to 1970 when America was great. Let’s have a 60% top rate and say “Goodbye Deficit”.
how about we cut the *entire* government and start fresh?
-s
..ps
you cannot cut anything and expect an improvement until you route the thieves running the whole show.
-to not do so first would render any “cuts” an illusion, as they have always been.
-s
Foreign aid is the defense budget. Out of the $40bn USAID budget only about 10% goes to actual disaster relief – the rest is required to support geopolitical aims. And even that is mostly spent on US contractors.
Most of the foreign aid just goes to Haliburton in Iraq and Afghanistan – the rest goes to support our allies – ie. Mubarek. It’s generally cheaper to pay to keep your allies in power than to invest in the army needed to take over their country.
Troll bait. Get them page views up.
>Let’s raise taxes to at least the 1980 level. Aaawww forget that, let’s go back to 1970 when America was great. Let’s have a 60% top rate and say “Goodbye Deficit”.
In both years, the top rate was 70%. So who here want’s to pay the Fusion tax rate? 70% on income over $100k, 60% on all income over 44000, 50% of all income over 22000, 32% of all income over 10000, and no, there was no indexing for inflation until Ronald Reagan showed up. I hope none of the Reagan hating liberals on this board say they would rather paythe Reagan rates.
>Addressing an issue like SS will require bipartisan effort.
Yes, the Senate is filling the void left by Obama’s ducking the issue. Delivered a budget that had one fourth the spending cuts presented by his own debt commission, and increases spending by 50% in ten years.
#56 “There you go again”
#77 Your infested mentality is pervasive in Congress and of course part of the problem.
If the Dems and Puke’s go on television together and say something like this,..I am sure we’ll have a breakthrough.
———————
We interrupt the Simpson’s for a special announcement that affects you and your family…
My fellow sheeple, today both parties announce that we will definitively reduce both military spending substantially and raise the baseline qualifications to receive social security and Medicare.
Yes, we have a fiscal emergency and we are taking measures now to avert disaster. We will not let grandma die and the Russian Army is likely to invade Germany anyway, not us.
You asked for bipartisan cooperation to do the right thing. Well, here it is. If you want details, it’s on the .GOV internet so don’t look
to your local news clown for info.
From Obama idolizer Andrew Sullivan:
The core challenge of this time is not the cost of discretionary spending. Obama knows this; everyone knows this. The crisis is the cost of future entitlements and defense, about which Obama proposes nothing. Yes, there’s some blather. But Obama will not risk in any way any vulnerability on taxes to his right or entitlement spending to his left. He convened a deficit commission in order to throw it in the trash. If I were Alan Simpson or Erskine Bowles, I’d feel duped. And they were duped. All of us who took Obama’s pitch as fiscally responsible were duped.”
Hmm, at the first press conference Obama says he will work for tax code reform and Medicaid and Medicare reform…
>Cuts are being made to the graduate student Pell grant program.
Actually parts of the program are being reclassified as entitlement spending, along with highway funding, so as to claim to be cutting discretionary spending. All told, 2 trillion dollars of the 2.2 trillion in claimed cuts are gimmicks or unexplained.
OFF with their heads..
CUT all top wage jobs in the government.
NO JOBS over $100k.
What happened to the claims that the stimulus was temporary, and the deficit was going to drop once you get rid of that? I even saw people posting that on this blog, poor saps. This is now the fiscal year 2012 budget proposed with a deficit of over 1 trillion dollars, not what was claimed in the budget prediction 2 years ago. Indeed the deficit is higher with this budget than without it.
Two EASY plays:
1. Cut the military in half. Recall troops from silly places like Japan and Europe. Close oversea bases. Get out of Iraq and Afghanistan. All our military might does not buy us friends on the street. It gets us animosity from the populations impacted. To protect our interests, tell countries that host terrorist that we will remotely bomb them at will if they cannot control their people/factions.
2. Index social security with life expectancy. It’s a no brainer. The idea of retiring for 30+ years is ridiculous.
The hard one is what to do with medicare.
Such an easy question. Cut ALL of the programs ALL the way to nothing.
The military can be downsized to a force needed for protection from foreign forces. The Mexican border would be a great place to start for securing the country.
If America so needs these programs they can be implemented through private corporations. If you think it is a good idea as an individual you can invest in the appropriate company or create your own.
Immigration is good, we need the new ideas. There is already a process to allow immigration. If we do not like the laws governing immigration there is a process to change them.
But lets start with enforcement of existing laws and stop being creative with the constitution.
Lets start with cutting their salaries.
Even Newt said to “Make the Pentagon into a TRIANGLE !!!” – So, lets have our “Peace Dividend”, stop throwing money down the rathole, and BALANCE THE BUDGET !!!
Obama said in the press conference that this budget balances the budget by the middle of the decade. One reporter actually called him on it, and pointed out that his budget has more than 500 billion in deficits at the middle of the decade and increases from there. Obama then responded with gobbledygook.
The only question is was Obama lying or is he ignorant of his own budget?
#77
“>Addressing an issue like SS will require bipartisan effort.
Yes, the Senate is filling the void left by Obama’s ducking the issue. Delivered a budget that had one fourth the spending cuts presented by his own debt commission, and increases spending by 50% in ten years.”
Social security is not in danger. Not a problem. You are pointed in the wrong direction.
OK, you’ve cut 500 billion, where are you getting the other 500 billion from?
Mike: hopefully by restoring a sane tax rate.
#89 ..ne reporter actually called him on it, ..
Oh Miken. What a said case you are.
You should listen to the likes of Warren Buffett (who sits on Obama’s economic panel) and not so much on the paparazzi for economy projections.
Not economy projections, they were reading from Obama’s own budget, perhaps prepared by the likes of Warren Buffett. It was Obama who made statements at odds with the budget prepared by his panel, with people like Warren Buffett, and claimed the deficit would be gone by the middle of the decade. Was Obama lying or ignorant when he said this?
On the budget, what my budget does is to put forward some tough choices, some significant spending cuts so that by the middle of this decade our annual spending will match our annual revenues. We will not be adding more to the national debt. It’s — so, to use a — sort of, an analogy that families are familiar with, we’re not going to be running up the credit card anymore.
QUESTION: A little — a little fine print — a little fine print in the budget, Mr. President.
You’ve said that this budget is not going to add to the credit card as of about the middle of the decade. And, as Robert Gibbs might say, I’m not a budget expert and I’m not an economist, but if you could just explain to me how you can say that, when, if you look on one page — page 171, which I’m sure you’ve read, it is the central page in this, the deficits go from $1.1 trillion down to $768 billion, and they go down again, all the way to $607 billion in 2015.
QUESTION: And then they start to creep up again, and by 2021, it’s at $774 billion. And the total over those 10 years — the total debt is $7.2 trillion on top of the $14 trillion we already have.
How can you say that we’re living within our means?
OBAMA: Well, here — here – here’s — let me be clear on what I’m saying because I’m not suggesting that we don’t have to do more.
We still have all this accumulated debt as a consequence of the recession and as a consequence of a series of decisions that were made over the last decade. We’ve piled up — we’ve racked up a whole bunch of debt. And there’s a lot of interest on that debt.
So in the same way that if you’ve got a credit card and you’ve got a big balance, you may not be adding to principal; you’ve still got all that interest that you’ve got to pay. Well, we’ve got a big problem in terms of accumulated interest that we’re paying and that’s why we’re going to have to whittle down furthers the debt that’s already been accumulated. So that’s problem number one.
And problem number two we already talked about, which is rising health care costs and programs like Medicaid and Medicare are going to, once you get past this decade, going to start zooming up again as a consequence of the population getting older and health care costs going up more rapidly than incomes and wages and revenues are going up. So you’ve got those two big problems.
What we’ve done is to try to take this in stages. What we say in our budget is let’s get control of our discretionary budget to make sure that whatever it is that we’re spending on an annual basis, we’re also taking in a similar amount. That’s step number one.
Step number two is going to make — is going to be how do we make sure that we’re taking on these long-term drivers, and how do we start whittling down the debt?
And that’s going to require entitlement reform and it’s going to require tax reform. And in order to accomplish those two things, we’re going to have to have a spirit of cooperation between Democrats and Republicans, and I think that’s possible. I think that’s what the American people are looking for.
#95 I found his clarification quite complete but like Pres Obama, I’m mostly interested in the seeing the forest and not trees.
Kudos to the paparazzi for pointing out page 171 to the president. We are making some progress in bringing this issue to a head.
So was he lying or ignorant when he said his budget eliminates the deficit in the middle of the decade?
#98 probably ignorant of the details. I don’t expect the president to be versed on the details of page 171.
I agree he should have just said, ‘..frankly, I forgot what’s on page 171 but I’ll have someone in my economic staff discuss this with your economic staff.”
So the president just made up stuff about the budget being in balance. He was ignorant as to the actual details.
No on part 1 and yes on part 2.