Homeless in Arizona

But sadly this is the normal line of BS that comes from politicians who pretend to work for us. At the same time they are voting for more taxes, they are usually lying thru their teeth bragging to us how they voted to cut taxes.

I believe that the Congressional Record is excellent proof of it. In it members of Congress usually put quotes of them supporting both sides of every issue. That way a congressman when he is running for reelection can cite the record and say he supported cutting taxes, while at the same time saying he supported pork projects for special interest groups in his home state.

Source

Obama unveils $3.77 trillion spending plan

By Lori Montgomery, Updated: Wednesday, April 10, 8:40 AM

President Obama unveiled a 10-year budget blueprint Wednesday that calls for nearly $250 billion in new spending on jobs, public works and expanded pre-school education and nearly $800 billion in new taxes, including an extra 94 cents a pack on cigarettes.

But the president’s spending plan would also cut more than $1 trillion from programs across the federal government — for the first time targeting Social Security benefits — in an effort to persuade congressional Republicans to join him in finishing the job of debt reduction they started two years ago.

“Our economy is poised for progress, as long as Washington doesn’t get in the way,” Obama said in announcing his budget plan in the White House Rose Garden. He said his budget represents “a fiscally responsible blueprint for middle-class jobs and growth.”

He said his budget replaces “the foolish across-the-board spending cuts” known as the sequester that are “already hurting our economy.” The plan reduces the deficit and makes necessary investments “because we can do both,” he said. “We can grow our economy, and shrink our deficits.” He added: “The numbers work. There’s not a lot of smoke and mirrors in here.”

Obama challenged Republicans to show they are serious about deficit reduction by reforming the tax code to eliminate loopholes that benefit the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations.

“If you’re serious about deficit reduction, then there’s no excuse to keep these loopholes open,” he said. “They don’t serve an economic purpose. They don’t grow our economy. They don’t put people back to work. All they do is to allow folks who are already well off and well connected to game the system.” He vowed that he would not “finish the job of deficit reduction on the backs of middle class families or through spending cuts alone that actually hurt our economy short term.”

Obama warned: “When it comes to deficit reduction, I’ve already met Republicans more than halfway.”

In his fifth annual budget request to Congress, Obama walks a fine line between reassuring voters anxious about the sluggish economy and facilitating compromise with a GOP that remains fixated on the dangerously high national debt.

Obama’s written message to Congress calls a growing economy the “North Star that guides our efforts.” To that end, his budget seeks $50 billion in new cash for roads and public works, $1 billion for 15 new institutes to promote innovation in manufacturing and $77 billion to make free, public pre-school available to 4-year-olds nationwide.

The cost of those initiatives would be covered through spending cuts and new revenues, including placing a $3 million cap on the value of individual retirement accounts and raising the federal cigarette tax from $1.01 to $1.95 per pack.

Meanwhile, the budget continues Obama’s outreach to Republicans by converting the private debt-reduction offer he has been making for months to GOP leaders into a formal proposal. That package proposes to replace the sequester — $1.2 trillion in deep, automatic spending cuts that took effect March 1 — with $1.8 trillion in alternative policies.

Nearly $600 billion would come from higher taxes on the wealthy, primarily through new limits on itemized deductions for families in the top tax brackets. The budget also would impose a new, minimum tax rate of 30 percent on households earning over $1 million a year, with exemptions to permit large charitable contributions.

But the rest of the package largely calls for replacing the sequester’s indiscriminate cuts to the Pentagon and other agency budgets with the sort of long-lasting entitlement reforms Republicans have long been demanding.

As he has in the past, Obama proposes to slice $400 billion from federal health programs, primarily Medicare, with the bulk of the cuts falling on drug companies and other providers. But Medicare beneficiaries would also take a hit, through higher premiums for couples making more than $170,000 a year and inducements for low-income recipients to use more generic drugs.

And for the first time, Obama formally proposes to slow the growth in Social Security benefits by applying a less-generous measure of inflation to programs throughout the federal government. The change would trim cost-of-living increases by roughly 0.3 percent a year, saving the government about $130 billion over the next decade.

White House officials said the new inflation measure — known as the chained consumer price index, or chained CPI — would not apply to programs for the poor, such as Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, and would be adjusted to reduce the impact on people 77 or older.

The deficit-reduction plan mirrors an offer Obama made in December to House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) in negotiations over the so-called fiscal cliff. At the time, Obama called for $1.2 trillion in new taxes, but the fiscal cliff deal included roughly $600 billion in new revenues over the next decade, with the bulk of the money coming from higher rates on households earning more than $450,000 a year.

Obama’s decision to include chained CPI in his budget proposal has infuriated many Democrats, and a number of liberal lawmakers protested the Social Security cuts Tuesday at the White House. Republicans, meanwhile, who have pressed the president to put the change on the table, have so far dismissed the offer as too “modest” to justify GOP support for higher taxes.

Some rank-and-file Republicans in the Senate have been more open to compromise, and Obama will dine with a dozen of them at the White House Wednesday evening. But as Washington barrels toward another potential showdown over the federal debt limit later this year, White House officials warned that the budget request represents the president’s bottom-line offer for getting federal borrowing under control.

“We don’t view this budget as a starting point in the negotiations. This is an offer where the president came more than halfway toward the Republicans,” a senior administration official told reporters Tuesday, speaking on condition of anonymity to detail the forthcoming document.

“So this is our sticking point,” the official said. “And the question is: are Republicans going to be willing to come to us to do serious things to reduce our deficits?”

While the president’s request falls far short of the austere, no-new-taxes, balanced-budget proposal adopted by House Republicans earlier this year, the White House argues that it represents serious debt reduction. Combined with budget deals enacted as part of the 2011 debt-limit fight, the fiscal cliff talks and other agreements, Obama’s new offer would reduce borrowing by a projected $4.3 trillion over the next decade — close to the sum recommended by independent budget analysts.

The budget proposes to spend $3.77 trillion in the fiscal year that starts in October, and projects a 2014 deficit of $744 billion, or 4.4 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. The budget gap would narrow steadily over the coming decade, shrinking to $439 billion in 2023, or 1.7 percent of GDP.

The national debt, meanwhile, would continue to grow to $25 billion from today’s $16.8 trillion. But it would be slowly shrinking when measured against a growing economy, falling to 73 percent of GDP by 2023.

All told, Obama calculates that his proposals would reduce projected borrowing by about $1.4 trillion over the next decade, but that figure includes more than $500 billion in savings from ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that the administration never intended to spend.

Subtracting those savings and the president’s proposal to replace the sequester brings total new debt reduction closer to $700 billion over the next decade.

William Branigin contributed to this report.

Emperor Obama to cut Social Security benifits????

Source

Obama’s budget strategy: Social Security, Medicare cuts an effort to break stalemate

By Lori Montgomery Washington Post Thu Apr 11, 2013 7:52 AM

In the first budget of his second term, President Barack Obama set aside the grand ambitions that marked his early days in office and sent Congress a blueprint aimed at achieving a simple goal: ending the long partisan standoff over the national debt.

The 10-year budget request Obama unveiled Wednesday calls for nearly $300 billion in new spending on jobs and public works. That includes a landmark, $77 billion expansion of preschool education financed by smokers, who would have to pay an extra 94 cents a pack for cigarettes.

But barely five months after winning a decisive re-election victory, Obama proposed nothing on the scale of the $1.2 trillion initiative to extend health coverage to the uninsured that he pursued after taking office in 2009.

Even his hopes for a jobs package have diminished; the budget suggested that Obama would like $300 billion to pump up the sluggish economy but would settle for $50 billion to build a few new roads and bridges.

Instead, with sharp automatic spending cuts threatening to slow the economic recovery and another showdown over the federal debt limit looming, the blueprint establishes a budget deal with Republicans as Obama’s top fiscal priority. For the first time, he is formally proposing to trim scheduled Social Security benefits — a GOP demand that is anathema to many Democrats.

He is also offering to make meaningful reductions in Medicare benefits, including higher premiums for couples making more than $170,000 a year.

“With this budget, you can’t say the president isn’t leading. He’s clearly leading,” said Robert Greenstein, president of the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

“Whether one agrees or disagrees with the specific policies, he has definitely stepped up to the plate to try to break the gridlock.”

House Republicans and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., quickly dismissed the proposal, which formalizes an offer they rejected in December. McConnell called the cuts to Social Security and Medicare too “modest” to justify Obama’s bottom-line demand for nearly $700 billion in new taxes on the wealthy, primarily through new limits on itemized deductions for households in the top brackets.

“I don’t see this as fundamental entitlement reform as much as clarifying a statistic which does happen to save money,” House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said of Obama’s offer to apply a less-generous measure of inflation — known as the chained Consumer Price Index, or chained CPI — to Social Security benefits.

Some rank-and-file Republicans in the Senate were more complimentary. Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., said Obama is “talking about Medicare reform, he’s talking about entitlement reform, and it will be interesting to see where the conversation goes.”

Isakson and other GOP senators were scheduled to join Obama for dinner at the White House on Wednesday.

With McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, showing no interest in further talks, administration officials see Senate Republicans as their best hope for advancing a bipartisan agreement.

Obama warned during remarks in the Rose Garden on Wednesday that the budget represents his bottom-line offer. Any deal, he said, must not only replace “the foolish across-the-board spending cuts,” known as the sequester, that are “already hurting our economy” but also raise revenue from “the wealthiest individuals and biggest corporations.”

Of the entitlement cuts, Obama said, “I don’t believe that all these ideas are optimal, but I’m willing to accept them as part of a compromise.” He added, “When it comes to deficit reduction, I’ve already met Republicans more than halfway. So in the coming days and weeks, I hope that Republicans will come forward and demonstrate that they’re really as serious about the deficits and debt as they claim to be.”

Though presidents have for nearly a century launched the budget process, Obama’s request for the fiscal year that begins in October arrived on Capitol Hill 65 days late, weeks after the House and Senate had each adopted its own spending blueprint.

In the House, Ryan’s plan seeks to balance the budget over the next decade without new taxes, in part by keeping the sequester in place, repealing Obama’s health-care initiative and making unprecedented cuts to Medicaid and other programs for the poor. In the Senate, Budget Committee Chairman Patty Murray, D-Wash., won narrow approval for a competing spending plan that would replace the $1.2 trillion sequester in part with nearly $1 trillion in new taxes.

Neither proposal would trim Social Security benefits. And though Ryan proposes to replace Medicare with a cheaper system known as “premium support,” Obama’s budget offers by far the largest Medicare savings in the near term: $370 billion over the next decade vs. roughly $130 billion in the Ryan budget.

The president’s debt-reduction proposal mirrors an offer he made to Boehner in negotiations over the “fiscal cliff.” At the time, Obama called for $1.2 trillion in new taxes. He ultimately won about $600 billion, with the bulk of the money coming from higher rates on households earning more than $450,000 a year.

Now Obama is proposing to pick up where he left off, replacing the sequester with $1.8 trillion in alternative policies that were left on the table.

In addition to higher taxes on the wealthy — including a new minimum tax rate of 30 percent on households earning more than $1 million a year — the package calls for replacing the sequester’s indiscriminate cuts to the Pentagon and other agency budgets with the sort of long-lasting entitlement changes Republicans have long demanded.

That includes nearly $400 billion from federal health programs, primarily Medicare, with the bulk of the cuts falling on drug companies and other providers. But Medicare beneficiaries would also take a hit, through higher premiums and requirements to substitute more expensive brand names with generic drugs.

Obama also proposes to slow the growth of Social Security benefits through the chained Consumer Price Index, trimming cost-of-living increases by roughly 0.3 percent a year and saving the government about $130 billion over the next decade.

White House officials said the change would not affect programs for the poor, such as Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, and would be adjusted to reduce the impact on retirees 77 or older.

Still, the proposal has infuriated many Democrats, who have long demanded that Social Security be protected from any debt-reduction deal.

Combined with budget deals enacted as part of the 2011 debt-limit fight, the fiscal-cliff talks and other agreements, Obama’s new proposal would reduce borrowing by a projected $4.3 trillion over the next decade — close to the sum recommended by independent budget analysts. That includes roughly $660 billion in new savings on top of the sequester, administration officials said.

For the coming fiscal year, the blueprint proposes to spend $3.78 trillion and projects a deficit of $744 billion, or 4.4 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. That’s down from the $973 billion deficit the White House projects for the current fiscal year and heralds an end to the era of record deficits in excess of $1 trillion that ramped up the national debt during and after the recent recession.

White House projections show the budget gap narrowing steadily over the coming decade, shrinking to $439 billion in 2023, or 1.7 percent of GDP. The national debt, meanwhile, would continue to grow to $25 trillion from today’s $16.8 trillion.

It would be slowly shrinking when measured against a growing economy but would remain at historically high levels throughout the next decade.

Obama’s budget request — the fifth of his presidency — proposes a range of other initiatives.

His written message to Congress calls a growing economy the “North Star that guides our efforts,” and his budget seeks $100 billion in new cash for roads and railways, $1 billion for 15 new institutes to promote innovation in manufacturing and $8 billion to help community colleges prepare students for existing jobs.

Obama also seeks hundreds of billions of dollars in new revenue, including a $3 million cap on the value of individual retirement accounts and an increase in the estate tax after 2018.

Administration officials emphasized that those proposals are separate from their offer for a debt-reduction compromise, which remains the top priority.