It’s Obama Vs. Congress On The Budget

President Obama’s $3.7 trillion budget reduces deficits by $1.1 trillion over a decade, but Republicans say it’s not enough.

About two-thirds of the deficit reduction comes from spending cuts in areas ranging from heating subsidies for the poor to grants for airports and water-treatment plants. The rest is from revenue increases, including letting taxes rise for married couples with more than $250,000 in annual income, according to the documents…

Scores of programs would be slashed under the administration’s budget to make room for increases elsewhere while still staying within Obama’s promise to freeze non-defense discretionary spending for the next five years. About half of all federal departments and agencies would see their budget reduced from levels in 2010, the last time agencies had an enacted budget, according to the administration documents.

There are spending proposals that the administration believes is integral to growing the economy long-term.

Obama is calling for the elimination of a dozen tax breaks for oil, gas and coal companies to raise $46 billion over 10 years. These funds would be diverted to help pay for putting 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015, doubling the share of electricity from clean energy by 2035 and increasing the efficiency of energy use in buildings by 20 percent.

The administration wants to spend $53 billion over the next six years on high-speed rail, and proposes spending $15.7 billion to build a nationwide wireless network for emergency workers and to widen access to mobile high-speed Internet. Obama also included his plan for a National Infrastructure Bank, seeding it with $50 billion intended to lure private investment for specific projects.

This is likely to meet much resistance from the right.

House Speaker John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, dismissed Obama’s spending freeze, saying it would come only after Democrats approved sizable spending increases over the past two years. “Locking in that level of spending is way too much,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Boehner and Ryan argued that cutting the deficit and spending are more important to economic growth than the increases in education, research and infrastructure spending that Obama wants.

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.