GOP, deficit hawks pan Obama’s $3.9T budget
Published 10:14 am Wednesday, March 5, 2014
WASHINGTON — Republicans are dismissing President Barack Obama’s new $3.9 trillion budget as nothing more than a Democratic manifesto for this fall’s congressional campaigns, but the fiscal plan is taking hits from another quarter too — anti-deficit groups.
Obama on Tuesday sent lawmakers a 2015 budget top-heavy with provisions that have little chance of becoming law. They included $1 trillion in tax increases — mostly on the rich and corporations — and a collection of populist but mostly modest spending boosts for consumer protection, climate change research and improved technology in schools.
It even trumpeted $2.2 trillion in 10-year deficit reduction, though most of the proposed savings, including fresh tax boosts plus cuts in government payments to Medicare providers, seemed long shots to make it through Congress. Almost one-third came from claiming savings from the end of U.S. fighting in Iraq and troop withdrawals from Afghanistan.
That meant the budget’s clearest impact was political: feeding Democrats’ election-year narrative that they are trying to help narrow the income gap between rich and poor while creating jobs. Republicans, who see tax cuts as the surest way to help the economy, pounced.
“The president has once again opted for the political stunt for a budget that’s more about firing up the president’s base in an election year than about solving the nation’s biggest and most persistent long-term challenges,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
“This budget isn’t a serious document, it’s a campaign brochure,” said House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis.
Obama and his Democratic allies saw things differently.
“It’s a road map for creating jobs with good wages and expanding opportunity for all Americans,” the president said while visiting an elementary school in the nation’s capital. He added that his plan would help curb budget deficits with higher taxes on the wealthy and other savings, “not by putting the burden on folks who can least afford it.”
Despite those words, pressure for lawmakers to take serious swipes at budget shortfalls has faded.
After four years of record-setting annual deficits that each exceeded $1 trillion, the budget gap dropped to $680 billion in 2013 and could continue downward. Obama’s budget projects shortfalls of $649 billion this year and $564 billion in 2015.