According to the White House the new Obama budget will focus on: 1. Domestic spending 2. Trim the defense budget 3. Curb health-care costs 4. Close tax loopholes for the wealthiest Americans In this article on USA Today, it talks about how the budget has angered many on the left and right. This is a oversimplification, but generally the left appears to be upset about cutting any domestic spending and the right about the tax loopholes. Here's a statement by John Boehner... Boehner's statement insinuates Obama is raising taxes on all Americans. I haven't read that - just that he's getting rid of tax loopholes the wealthiest Americans use to pay less tax. Anyway, what do you think about the budget?
I think Obama is wimp that has almost no idea of what he is doing . I mean Bush was a clumsy SOB but this guy is the fail itself . He's all show and no go . I expected him to take up some drastic measures yet the only thing he did from an outside view is make the US weaker and keep his public image of a cool and wise guy . With China and Russia in a full blown arms research race the US needs to keep up the balance of power . He's not a diplomat , not a economist and by no measure a great leader . I don't see ANY change between the US of 2008 and the US of 2011 . The best thing about Obama is that he has little chance of being reelected .
In my opinion, curbing the health care cost and most importantly cutting down the defense budget(what I prefer calling War Budget) are two MUSTS for Obama Administration. Fixing up tax loopholes might not interest a lot of people, but then again it's an appreciative effort.
No war budget leads to oil fields getting in the hands of people they don't like, so cutting that too much is a no no. There's really no security threat, there's no need to call it defense budget, we all know it's used for other than defense.
The Clinton Era of a balanced budget and reduced deficits can best be achieved by sound budgetary legislation and dismantling the Republican revenue legislation of 2001 that has exasperated the national deficit and was causal with an unfunded Iraqi war for the 07-09 Recession and the aftermath of a seriously weakened American economy. Deficit reduction was not accomplished by the Bush Administration tax legislation but in fact was the impetus for even larger deficits as the prologue to its enactment - Proof of its failure prior to the reduction of deficits is reason enough for its repeal and reenactment for earnings above 200K as appropriate in light of sacrifices sustained by others for the common goal of national solvency.
I haven't seen a budget proposal yet, so its hard to have an opinion. He can talk about cutting costs, targeted tax increases, and closing loopholes all he wants, but until he actually proposes something concrete, he might as well be promising us pink ponies and unicorns. I know this much. Spending under Obama has grown at a faster pace than almost any time in history. If you were to take out all the supposed NREs from the Obama stimulus which turned out to be permanent additions to the budget, if you were to take out all the expansions to government agencies and programs instituted specifically under Obama, if you were to take out all of that and focus only on the new spending associated with Obama-care, it leaves one to wonder what the hell congress was thinking. We had this massive debt crisis and tried to solve it by buying a new Ferrari's on a $20k a year income. Obama sold the bill by telling the American people with a straight face that the bill was necessary to fix our economic woes. For me to buy into his budget, he is going to have to cut the budget back to the level he found it at in 2009. He needs to cut his own expansions to government first, and then we can talk about raising taxes on anyone. Anything short of that is simply not credible. You can't double the size of the federal budget and then say you are going to shave 5% here or 10% there and then cover the rest with taxes on anyone(no I have nothing against the rich or big businesses). Two years ago, Obama said he would pay for Obama care by elimination of waste and fraud in Medicare. Has he eliminated any waste and fraud? I mean that would be an obvious source of revenue that should be explored whether or not you want to spend the money for Obama care. The answer is no, he hasn't. Now he is going to balance the budget by elimination of "tax-loopholes"? If loopholes of the size needed to balance the budget actually exist, why has nobody tackled them already? Google pays an effective tax rate of 2.4%, Goldman 1%, despite our federal corporate tax rate is 35%, with city and state taxes on top of that. If you note the date of the article, its a half a year old, and the practice has been going on for nearly a decade. In such an economic crisis, it seems Obama might have spent some time closing such loopholes instead of incurring new debt. He might also have considered lowering our corporate tax rate at the same time, to levels that are competitive with a country other than Japan. No, I suspect that if the man was being honest, something he is likely not capable of, he would just say he is going to raise taxes on the rich(calling anyone over 250k rich), in order to pay for the fact he doubled the size of government in his short two years in office. Call my cynical, but I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for him to take steps to fix even the most obvious of these problems. He'll give a nice speech though.