President Obama says he has not given up on major health care legislation, and his new budget backs him up. The $3.8 trillion budget released by the White House on Monday includes $150 billion in deficit reduction over 10 years on the presumption that a health care bill will be adopted.
Here's an idea, the nation's budget should be required reading for school kids (and for adults). Kids could learn a lot about budgeting and finances and would be better prepared to understand these things as an adult. I plan to pick over this budget later on today.
Announcing his budget for the year, President Obama defends his spending proposals by saying "the previous administration and previous Congress" created a $1.3 trillion deficit that greeted him when he took office. Flanked by Christina Romer, the head of the Council of Economic Advisers; Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner; budget director Peter Orszag; and Larry Summers, his chief economic adviser, Obama chides the "failure to rein in spending as well as a reliance on borrowing, from Wall Street to Washington to Main Street, to fuel our growth."From Peter Orszag:
"That’s what we have to change," he says. (10:45 a.m.)
Obama warns: "We won't be able to bring down this deficit overnight." He says his budget has tax cuts for investments in small businesses, tax credits for small-business hiring and other tax incentives for repairing roads and bridges and retrofitting homes.
Highlighting the need to curb spending, his proposed education investment and discretionary spending freeze, Obama says they are "the investments we must make." Read more at Politico
Today, the President transmitted the FY 2011 Budget to the Congress. In about an hour, he will deliver remarks about the Budget, and after that I will be taking questions from the press with CEA Chair Romer. This post gives readers of OMBlog a brief overview of the document.Orszag talks to Bloomberg:
After a year in which we took immediate and unprecedented action to rescue the economy from the brink of a second Great Depression, the FY 2011 Budget takes steps to jumpstart job creation, strengthen the economic security of middle-class families, and make the tough choices to put our Nation back on the path to fiscal sustainability.
When the President took office, the economy was on the brink of a depression. The economic crisis required that we take immediate and extraordinary steps to prevent a complete economic collapse that would have caused millions more to lose their jobs. Not all of the efforts we undertook to avoid a deeper recession were popular. Nonetheless the President did what was right for our country’s future: signing into law the Recovery Act to jumpstart economic growth and taking steps to prevent the collapse of the financial system.
A year later, the economy is back from the brink – and is growing again. This "statistical recovery," however, is cold comfort for the millions of Americans who have lost their job. The President has therefore called for a package to spur job creation now – including small business tax cuts and investments in clean energy and infrastructure.
To sustain job creation and economic growth into the years ahead and provide room for the private sector to expand, we are also making tough choices in the Budget: cutting what doesn’t work or isn’t necessary and investing in what will help to expand the economy and employment in the coming years.
The Budget thus institutes a three-year non-security discretionary freeze that will save $250 billion over the next decade. We're not putting forward an across-the-board freeze, but rather an overall cap on non-security discretionary funding in which key investments are expanded but we cut back on programs that are ineffective, duplicative, or just wasteful. As part of that overall effort, we identified more than 120 programs across the government that should be terminated or reduced – generating $20 billion in savings. Read more
