WASHINGTON — The White House is focusing on re-election themes such as jobs and public works projects in President Barack Obama’s new budget blueprint while relying on familiar but never enacted tax increases on the wealthy and corporations to reduce future deficits after four years of trillion dollar-plus shortfalls.
Obama’s 2013 budget, set for release Monday, is the official start to an election-year budget battle with Republicans. It’s unlikely to result in a genuine effort to address the $15 trillion national debt or the entrenched deficits that keep piling on to it. But it will serve as the Democrats’ party-defining template on this year’s election stakes.
The president’s plan is laden with stimulus-style initiatives: sharp increases for highway construction and school modernization, and a new tax credit for businesses that add jobs. But it avoids sacrifice with only minimal curbs on the unsustainable growth of Medicare even as it proposes a 10-year, $61 billion “financial crisis responsibility fee” on big banks to recoup the 2008 Wall Street bailout.
This budget plan, administration officials say, borrows heavily from Obama’s recommendations in September to a congressional deficit “supercommittee” that was assigned to come up with at least $1.2 trillion in deficit savings as part of last summer’s default-avoiding budget and debt pact. The panel deadlocked and left Washington to struggle with bruising across-the-board spending cuts that kick in next January.
