President Obama unveils
a record $4.1 trillion budget that finances education, health care and climate change with new taxes on crude oil, big banks and the wealthy.
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama on Tuesday unveiled a record $4.1 trillion, election year budget that finances Democratic priorities like education, health care and climate change with new taxes on crude oil, the wealthy and big banks.
The progressive wish list, which comes as the nation’s long-term fiscal outlook is deteriorating, underscores the initiatives pushed by Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, who hope to succeed Obama. Republicans dismissed the proposal as a tax-and-spend exercise.
Obama called the budget — his eighth and final one — “a road map to a future that embodies America’s values and aspirations: a future of opportunity and security for all of our families; a rising standard of living; and a sustainable, peaceful planet for our kids.”
The budget calls for a major new tax on crude oil that would raise the price of gasoline, currently averaging about $1.80 a gallon nationwide, by about 24 cents. All told, its tax hikes would average more than a quarter-trillion dollars a year to cover deficits made worse by a softening economic picture. The $2.8 trillion net tax hike package would almost double the tax increases Obama sought — and was denied — last year.
“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,” said House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis.
Obama’s budget largely leaves alone huge benefit programs like Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid and food stamps, whose spiraling growth is the main driver of budget deficits.
The Obama plan sees the deficit rising from $438 billion last year to more than $500 billion for the 2017 budget year that starts Oct. 1.
Washington’s nonpartisan budget scolds were unimpressed by the pro- posal.
“The president once promised not to leave our fiscal problems for future generations to solve, but in this budget, that is exactly what he does,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
While virtually no one in Washington is predicting a major budget pact this year between Obama and Republicans, administration officials saw bipartisan hope for proposals to combat heroin and opioid addiction, fund a “moonshot” effort to find cancer cures and expand tax credits for the working poor.
Other tax increases include a .07 percent fee on larger banks that would raise about $10 billion a year; reducing the value of itemized deductions taken by wealthier taxpayers to raise a whopping $646 billion over a decade; almost doubling the approximately $1 per pack federal cigarette tax; and a new proposal to require a greater number of wealthier people to pay a 3.8 percent Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, tax surcharge.