WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama has sent Congress a $3.73 trillion budget that holds out the prospect of eventually bringing deficits under control through spending cuts and tax increases. But the fiscal blueprint largely ignores his own deficit commission’s recommendations to slash huge entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.
Obama called his new budget one of “tough choices and sacrifices,” but most of those cuts would be held off until after the end of his first term.
Overall, Obama proposed trimming the deficits by $1.1 trillion over a decade although his changes would actually add to the deficits this year and next. Obama is projecting the deficit will hit an all-time high of $1.65 trillion this year and then drop sharply to $1.1 trillion in 2012, with an expected improvement in the economy and as reductions in Social Security withholding and business taxes disappear.
