WASHINGTON — President Obama on Monday released an aggressive $4 trillion budget blueprint for next year that proclaims victory in the long, difficult climb from recession and relies on large tax increases to fund efforts in education, infrastructure construction and work force development that he says have waited far too long.
The fiscal 2016 budget rests on two major presidential pushes that have virtually no chance in Congress: large tax increases on multinational corporations and the rich, and the passage of a comprehensive immigration law that would lift the economy with millions of new and newly legalized workers.
But buried in the budget are kernels of proposals that could take root with a Republican Congress. Both parties are eager to release the military from constraints imposed by automatic spending cuts, known as sequestration, approved in 2011. Both understand that the highway trust fund will once again reach empty in June, making its replenishment — and the revitalization of the nation’s crumbling infrastructure — priorities for the coming year.
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The White House wants that proposal to be part of a much larger plan to change the way businesses are taxed and lower the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 28 percent — 25 percent for manufacturers.
But with the clock ticking on federal highway and transit programs, that more ambitious plan could fall away for a targeted infrastructure plan backed by both parties.
Mr. Obama also proposed a major expansion of the earned income credit for low-income workers without children. That is a proposal also backed by leading Republicans such as Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. But paying for it would be difficult. The expansion would cost the Treasury nearly $66 billion over 10 years.
