President Barack Obama’s budget, which will be introduced on Wednesday, takes a political position that some of his base is bound to bemoan. Rather than present an outline of progressive priorities, the White House has chosen to stake claim to the middle ground, offering up a mix of modest tax hikes to go along with spending cuts and entitlement reforms that Democrats have long warned against.
The specifics are as follows:
- The budget would reduce the deficit by $1.8 trillion over ten years -- $600 billion of this reduction would come from revenue raisers, and $1.2 trillion would come from spending reductions and entitlement reforms;
- It would change the benefit structure of Social Security (chained-CPI);
- It would means test additional programs in Medicare;
- All told, it would include $400 billion in health care savings (or cuts);
- It would cut $200 billion from other areas, identified by The New York Times as “farm subsidies, federal employee retirement programs, the Postal Services and the unemployment compensation system;”
- It would pay for expanded access to pre-K (an Obama priority) by increasing the tobacco tax;
- It would set limits on tax-preferred retirement accounts for the wealthy, prohibiting individuals from putting more than $3 million in IRAs and other tax-preferred retirement accounts;
- And it would stop people from collecting full disability benefits and unemployment benefits that cover the same period of time.
Looked at the proposal piece by piece, nothing is all that surprising. Obama has proposed these policies in various offers in the past. Most recently, they’ve been discussed as part of replacement options for the sequester.
But as a political tactic, this is a bit of a gamble for the administration. Instead of staking out a progressive plank and starting negotiations from there, the White House is trying to lay claim to the middle ground. Obama is helped here by the fact that the Senate has passed a Democratic-authored budget that is more progressive than theirs -- one that the president supported. But congressional Republicans will, almost assuredly, ignore that document and work off the White House’s in order to re-define the “center.”
The good news for progressives is that members of the administration are insisting that certain lines won’t be crossed, chief among them being that the president won’t accept entitlement reforms without Republicans agreeing to revenue.
