ROGER WICKER: His final budget as president of the United States has arrived with a resounding thud here in the Congress of the United States. “The year, with no unusual circumstances to prevent us from doing our work, we have been provided with no reasonable explanation for the decision not to hold a hearing”, wrote Democratic members of the House Budget panel.
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“Will we accept an economy where prosperity belongs to a few and opportunity remains out of reach for too many?” he added.
The president’s budget contains $3 trillion in proposed tax increases over the next 10 years, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
Meanwhile, Obama’s fiscal year 2017 budget, also released on Tuesday, is proposing over $19 billion in cybersecurity funding, a 35 percent increase over this year’s spending plan. “This isn’t even a budget so much as it is a progressive manual for growing the federal government at the expense of hardworking Americans”.
One of President Obama’s transportation proposals would place a $10-per-barrel tax on petroleum to replenish the Highway Trust Fund. But even as the spotlights shift to those jockeying to replace Obama in the Oval Office, Donovan insists the president will keep pushing his own agenda. “With investments in priority areas from national security and cybercrime to community policing, this budget will allow us to protect the progress we have made and build on our success in the years to come”. It also seeks to cut deficits by $2.9 trillion over the coming decade through reforms in health programmes, the tax code, and immigration.
And although the Obama administration expects the debt to remain relatively stable as a share of the economy, that projection is based on a set of assumptions: The economy will continue to grow by about 2.5% over the next decade. Our unemployment rate is below five percent for the first time in nearly eight years.
In keeping with the two-year budget deal struck with Congress in December, the president requested only a slight increase, less than 1%, in discretionary spending programs overall, though Republicans still accused him profligate spending.
Republicans have long complained that Obama has failed to attack the chief cause of future deficits.
The budget plan is for the fiscal year beginning October 1. The White House notes there’s bipartisan support for accelerating cancer research, offering more treatment to people addicted to heroin and prescription pain medication, and expanding a tax credit to help low-income workers who don’t have children.
The budget proposes lifting the limits entirely from 2018.
The budget also pledges to make Americans safer in an increasingly risky world through higher military spending to fight the Islamic State terrorist threat and increased support for cybersecurity in the wake of last summer’s hack of government computers that compromised the personal information of 21 million Americans.
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The money included a $3.1-billion Information Technology Modernisation Fund to retire, replace, or modernize antiquated IT infrastructure, networks, and systems “that are expensive to maintain, provide poor functionality, and are hard to secure”.
