All the more so because it comes not from conservative critics of the president, but from Andrew Taylor of the Associated Press:
Taking a pass on reining in government growth, President Obama unveiled a record $3.8 trillion election-year budget plan Monday, calling for stimulus-style spending on roads and schools and tax hikes on the wealthy to help pay the costs. The ideas landed with a thud on Capitol Hill.
Though the Pentagon and a number of Cabinet agencies would get squeezed, Obama would leave the spiraling growth of health care programs for the elderly and the poor largely unchecked. The plan claims $4 trillion in deficit savings over the coming decade, but most of it would be through tax increases Republicans oppose, lower war costs already in motion and budget cuts enacted last year in a debt pact with GOP lawmakers….
Obama’s budget blueprint reprises a long roster of prior proposals: raising taxes on couples making more than $250,000 a year; eliminating numerous tax breaks for oil and gas companies and approving a series of smaller tax and fee proposals. Similar proposals failed even when the Democrats controlled Congress….
But there are spending increases, too: The Obama plan seeks $476 billion for transportation projects including roads, bridges and a much-criticized high-speed rail initiative. Grants for better performing schools would get a big increase under Obama’s “Race to the Top” initiative, and there would be an $8 billion fund to train community college students for high-growth industries….
The projections in Obama’s budget show that he is doing little to restrain the surge in [entitlement] programs that is expected with the retirement of baby boomers. Obama’s budget projects that Medicare spending will double over the coming decade from $478 billion this year to almost $1 trillion in 2022. Medicaid, the government health care program for the poor and disabled, would more than double from $255 billion this year to $589 billion by 2022.
Congressman Paul Ryan has posted the full story on his website. You can read it here. Save it as a handy reference guide for everything that is wrong with the president’s budget proposal.
Ho hum. I’m lost in the numbers. My eyes are glazing over.
Tell me that Obama’s budget isn’t going to help lower the price of gas, that it won’t help anyone find a job, that it won’t lead to people spending more, and that it won’t stop the decline in housing values.
That is something that will resonate.