WASHINGTON (AP) ― President Barack Obama is unwrapping a nearly $4 trillion budget that gives Democrats an election-year playbook for fortifying the economy and bolstering Americans’ incomes. It also underscores how pressure has faded to launch bold, new attacks on federal deficits.
Obama’s 2015 fiscal blueprint, which he is sending Congress Tuesday, was expected to include proposals to upgrade aging highways and railroads, finance more pre-kindergarten programs and enhance job training. The White House said it would also enlarge the earned income tax credit to cover 13.5 million low-earning workers without children, expand the child care tax credit for some parents and make it easier for workers to contribute to Individual Retirement Accounts.
A revamping of corporate income taxes and higher tobacco levies would help pay for some of the initiatives.
But with the Democratic-led Senate and Republican-run House gridlocked, much of Obama’s plan is likely to go nowhere in Congress or be whittled down. Lawmakers want to avoid anything that would help the other party or hurt their own prospects in this November’s elections, when Republicans are expected to retain control of the House of Representatives and might capture the Senate majority.
White House aides say Obama’s blueprint would obey overall agency spending limits enacted in December that followed a pact between Republican Rep. Paul Ryan and Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, the heads of the House and Senate budget committees.
Yet Obama will propose an additional package of $56 billion in spending priorities, the aides say, half for defense and half for domestic programs. It would be fully paid for by cutting spending and narrowing tax loopholes, such as boosting collections from U.S. firms doing business overseas, they said.
That package, like much of the president’s plan, seemed sure to draw catcalls from Republicans. Their recipe for accelerating economic growth includes cutting taxes or overhauling the entire tax code, and they criticize higher spending as wasteful.
Obama’s budget starts what should be a relatively peaceful year on Washington’s fiscal front lines. That is because land mines embedded in the budgetary landscape have been defused this time around after cliffhanger, partisan showdowns in recent years.
