After a year of relative peace in Washington’s budget battles, President Barack Obama will lay out a $4 trillion budget on Monday that needles Republicans with proposals for higher taxes on the wealthy and businesses to pay for education, public works projects and child care.
The plan, expected to be dismissed by GOP lawmakers now running Capitol Hill, rolls out as the deficit is dropping and Obama’s poll numbers inch higher. Though Republicans will march ahead on their own, they ultimately must come to terms with Obama, whose signature is needed on anything that is going to become law.
Big challenges loom: the need to increase the government’s borrowing limit; a deadline for sustaining highway funding; a bipartisan effort to ease painful, automatic cuts to the Pentagon and domestic agencies. Those cuts are the byproduct of Washington’s previous failures to tackle the government’s deficit woes.
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An outcry from his Democratic allies led the White House to retreat from a proposal to tax withdrawals from popular 529 college savings plans.
On spending, there’s a plan for $60 billion over the next 10 years to pay for two years of community college for an estimated 9 million students and $80 billion to increase access to child care for low- and middle-income families. The administration wants to pay for a six-year renewal of highway and transit programs by taxing overseas business profits that would be “repatriated” back to the U.S.
In dysfunctional Washington, hard feelings linger still from the early 2013 tax increase that Obama forced upon Republicans. There’s little hope of a “grand bargain” to fix the government’s budget woes for the long term, but a need to address problems such as a shortfall in highway funding and easing cuts to the Pentagon’s budget. Even such smaller steps will test the ability of Obama and Republicans controlling Congress to work together.
