Obama releases his budget wish list
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How little is Congress planning to do on the budget this year? Senate Democrats aren’t even going to release their own spending plan, arguing “it wouldn’t be productive to relitigate it so soon after our two-year deal,” as Washington Sen. Patty Murray said last week.
But President Obama has moved forward with his own budget anyway—a document that’s more of a wish list and a political platform than anything else. On Tuesday, he unveiled a plan that would boost spending by $56 billion in 2015 and increase tax credits for low-income adults, paid for largely by raising taxes on wealthy individuals.
That new spending plan includes additional money for early childhood education, health and clean energy research, manufacturing, jobs training, infrastructure, and paid medical leave. It also increases funds for defense programs, including weapons modernization, nuclear R&D, and military training and maintenance.
Obama’s new initiative would raise spending above the levels agreed to by the two-year deal that Murray and Republican Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin hammered out in December. That agreement “did not go far enough,” the plan says, pointing out that domestic discretionary spending will fall further in 2015—and will be “below 2007 funding levels adjusted for inflation.”
The additional $56 billion in spending would be fully offset by a combination of cuts and fees, as well as tax hikes on multimillion-dollar retirement accounts. Half of the initiative would by paid for by fairly incremental tweaks to the budget—reducing crop insurance subsidies, hiking TSA fees at airports, selling broadband spectrum and eliminating budget redundancies. But the other half would come from reducing tax breaks for individuals who’ve accumulated enough to finance their retirement at $200,000 a year.
“Some wealthy individuals are able to accumulate millions of dollars in these accounts, substantially more than is needed to ensure a secure retirement,” Obama’s budget says in arguing for the tax hike.
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