Obama Proposing $478 Billion Public Works Program in Budget
The $4 trillion budget that President Barack Obama sends Congress on Monday proposes higher taxes on wealthier Americans and corporations, and an ambitious $478 billion public works program for highway, bridge and transit upgrades.
The grab-bag of proposals, many recycled from past Obama budgets, already is generating fierce objections from Republicans, who control both chambers of Congress for the first time in his presidency. They will move ahead on their own, mindful they eventually must strike a deal with Obama, whose signature is needed for the budget to become law.
The spending blueprint for the 2016 budget year that begins Oct. 1 emphasizes the same themes as Obama's State of the Union address last month, when he challenged Congress to work with him on narrowing the income gap between the very wealthy and everyone else.
Obama, in an NBC interview before the Super Bowl, disputed a suggestion that he and the Republican-led Congress are so far apart that his budget proposals have no chance of winning approval.
"I think Republicans believe that we should be building our infrastructure," Obama said. "The question is how do we pay for it? That's a negotiation we should have."
The president said he was putting forward good proposals but was willing to listen to ideas presented by Republicans as well.
"My job is not to trim my sails and not tell the American people what we should be doing, pretending somehow we don't need better roads, that we don't need more affordable college," Obama said.
In documents obtained by The Associated Press, Obama lays out the country's first $4 trillion budget $3.999 trillion before rounding with proposed spending supported by $3.5 trillion in revenues.
The projected budget deficit would be $474 billion, slightly higher than the $467 billion forecast by the Congressional Budget Office for 2016. For the budget year that ended Sept. 30, the actual deficit was $483 billion. That was a marked improvement from the $1 trillion-plus deficits during Obama's first years in office, when the country was struggling to emerge from a deep recession.
The CBO sees the deficits rising for the rest of the decade, once again topping $1 trillion by 2025 as spending surges in the government's big benefit programs with the retirement of millions of baby boomers. Obama's budget projects a $687 billion deficit in 2025, though its forecast of economic growth would keep deficits at a manageable percentage of the gross domestic product.
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Obama Proposing $478 Billion Public Works Program in Budget