Obama Plans Major Shifts in Spending
By JACKIE CALMES and ROBERT PEAR
NYT
President Obama’s new budget blueprint estimates a stunning deficit of $1.75 trillion for the current fiscal year, which began five months ago, then lays out a wrenching change of course as he seeks to finance his own priorities while stanching the flow of red ink.
By redirecting enormous streams of deficit spending toward programs like health care, education and energy, and paying for some of it through taxes on the rich, pollution surcharges, and cuts in such inviolable programs as farm subsidies, the $3.55 trillion spending plan Mr. Obama is undertaking signals a radical change of course that Congress has yet to endorse and Republicans were quick to pounce on.
The deficit he inherited, a shortfall of more than $1 trillion as the current fiscal year began, has continued to swell in recent months with additional bank bailouts, the first wave of spending from a newly enacted stimulus plan and the continuing costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The administration, as it had announced, will try to cut that amount sharply by 2013, when Mr. Obama’s first term ends, to $533 billion, even as it escalates spending on top priorities.
(More here.)
NYT
President Obama’s new budget blueprint estimates a stunning deficit of $1.75 trillion for the current fiscal year, which began five months ago, then lays out a wrenching change of course as he seeks to finance his own priorities while stanching the flow of red ink.
By redirecting enormous streams of deficit spending toward programs like health care, education and energy, and paying for some of it through taxes on the rich, pollution surcharges, and cuts in such inviolable programs as farm subsidies, the $3.55 trillion spending plan Mr. Obama is undertaking signals a radical change of course that Congress has yet to endorse and Republicans were quick to pounce on.
The deficit he inherited, a shortfall of more than $1 trillion as the current fiscal year began, has continued to swell in recent months with additional bank bailouts, the first wave of spending from a newly enacted stimulus plan and the continuing costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The administration, as it had announced, will try to cut that amount sharply by 2013, when Mr. Obama’s first term ends, to $533 billion, even as it escalates spending on top priorities.
(More here.)
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