A budget proposal fit for Valentine's Day
The newly released budget proposal looks an awful lot like a love note.
President Barack Obama walks with Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Jack Lew on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington as they travel to Baltimore, Md., Monday, Feb. 14, 2011. The latest proposal shows a budget that would cut the deficit in half by 2013.
Charles Dharapak / AP
Here’s OMB director Jack Lew explaining how the Obama Administration’s proposed budget (released this morning) will reduce the budget deficit over the next ten years–cutting it in half by 2013 and by two-thirds by 2020. Problem is that that’s only relative to a “baseline” that builds in a lot of tax cuts that go beyond current law (extended beyond their expiration), and the President’s budget stays away from the major pressures on the federal budget–the growth of Medicare and Social Security spending and the lack of a solid enough revenue base to keep up with that spending.
I think it’s a fitting “Valentine’s Day” budget because it only pays “lip service” to the work of the President’s fiscal commission, writes a lot of “love notes” to those enduring Bush/Obama tax cuts, and still contains an awful lot of red ink.
More details later.
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