Obama's new budget: Higher taxes for the wealthy

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama unveiled a $3.8 trillion spending plan on Monday that seeks to achieve $4 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade but does little to restrain growth in the government's huge health benefit programs, a major cause of future deficits.

Obama's new budget was immediately attacked by Republicans as a retread of previously rejected ideas. The budget battle is likely to be a major component of the fall election campaign.

The president would achieve $1.5 trillion of the deficit reductions with tax increases on the wealthy and by removing certain corporate tax breaks. Rejecting GOP charges, he said in his budget message, "This is not about class warfare. This is about the nation's welfare."

In a message that repeated populist themes Obama also sounded in his State of the Union address, the president defended his proposed tax increases on the wealthy. It is important, he said to make sure the burden of getting deficits under control be a shared responsibility.

"This is about making fair choices that benefit not just the people who have done fantastically well over the last few decades but that also benefit the middle class, those fighting to get into the middle class and the economy as a whole," Obama said.

Obama used an appearance before students at Northern Virginia Community College to unveil the budget and highlight an $8 billion proposal that aims at boosting the ability of the nation's community colleges to train students for the jobs of the future. He told the students his budget was a "reflection of shared responsibility."

While administration officials defended the overall plan as a balanced approach, Republicans criticized it as failing to sufficiently restrain the deficit. Obama had promised in 2009 to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term.

House Speaker John Boehner said that Obama's budget was a "collection of rehashes, gimmicks and tax increases that will make our economy worse."

"This isn't really a budget at all. It's a campaign document," said Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. "The president is shirking his responsibility to lead and using this budget to divide."

Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, said that Obama had ducked "the responsibility to tackle this country's real fiscal problems.

Ryan is preparing an alternative to Obama's budget that will be similar to a measure that the House approved last year but failed in the Senate where many lawmakers objected to a major overhaul to Medicare.

"We do not intend on backing off on anything," Ryan said in an interview. "We intend on giving the country an alternative and a solution to our biggest problems."

Republicans challenged the math underlying Obama's budget, saying it double-counted deficit reductions already approved in an August budget deal and also claimed $848 billion in savings from ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan even though this money would not have been spent.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney assailed Obama's spending plan for failing to "take any meaningful steps toward solving our entitlement crisis."

This year's budget debate is expected to dominate the presidential contest and congressional elections with the issue not finally resolved probably until a lame-duck session of Congress after the November election, when lawmakers will have to decide what to do with expiring Bush-era tax cuts and looming across-the-board spending cuts.

Obama's new spending plan projects a deficit for the current budget year of $1.33 trillion, marking the fourth straight year that the deficit would top $1 trillion.

The spending plan projects the deficit would decrease to $901 billion in the 2013 budget year, which begins Oct. 1. That reflects $3.8 trillion in spending next year, an increase of 0.2 percent over this year's expected outlays, and a 17.5 percent increase in revenues.

The deficits are projected to gradually go down to $575 billion in 2018, which would still be higher in dollar terms than any deficits run up before Obama took office. It would be below 3 percent of the total economy, however, and thus at a level economists generally consider sustainable.

At a budget briefing, Alan Krueger, head of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, said the administration's economic forecast was essentially in line with private economists and the unemployment outlook was actually more pessimistic in light of recent improvements.

But the administration's expectation of economic growth of 3 percent this year and in 2013 is above the forecasts of many private economists. IHS Global Insight is looking for growth of just 2.1 percent this year and 2.3 percent in 2013.

Obama's budget hewed closely to the approach he outlined in September in a submission to the congressional "supercommittee" that failed to agree on at least $1.2 trillion in additional spending cuts to keep across-the-board cuts from taking effect next January.

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