Obama sets out his 2015 budget

President Obama unveiled his 2015 budget proposal this week, calling for more spending on infrastructure, job training, and preschool education while reducing tax burdens on lower- and middle-class workers and closing tax loopholes that benefit the wealthy. The plan would reduce the annual deficit to $564 billion, down from $649 billion in 2014. The president’s budget also calls for expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) to include low-wage workers without children and to beef up benefits for working families. To increase revenues by $53 billion over 10 years, the plan also calls for the implementation of the “Buffett Rule,” imposing a minimum tax rate of 30 percent on individuals earning more than $1 million a year. “As a country, we’ve got to make a decision if we’re going to protect tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans or if we’re going to make smart investments necessary to create jobs and grow our economy and expand opportunity for every American,” Obama said.

Since Congress already set spending limits through 2015 in a bipartisan deal in December, the president’s budget is being seen as a blueprint for the Democrats’ midterm election strategy rather than as an attainable fiscal proposal. Republicans were quick to condemn the plan, with House Speaker John Boehner calling it Obama’s “most irresponsible budget yet.” Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who negotiated the compromise bill with Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), called the budget “a campaign brochure.”

What the editorials said

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The president’s budget won’t survive congressional opposition, said The New York Times, but that doesn’t make it useless. The document underscores vital national goals—reducing inequality, rebuilding the economy—that could be achieved if Congress ended unfair tax breaks for the rich. Expanding the EITC, for example, provides an incentive to work for 5.8 million newly eligible workers. Yet “every dollar” of the $651 billion in new revenue Obama seeks over the next decade “will be resisted by Republicans.”

With this budget, “Obama is revving up the tax-and-spend engines,” said The Wall Street Journal, supporting “inequality and class warfare” big Democratic themes for the November elections. The budget leaves entitlement spending “on cruise control,” and by dropping his proposal to keep Social Security cost-of-living increases in check, Obama isn’t even making “a token outreach” to the GOP. His proposals on military spending will reduce defense outlays relative to GDP to their lowest levels since 1940, which “will impress Vladimir Putin, though not in a good way.”

What the columnists said

If all budgets are political documents, Obama’s is a “partisan opus,” said Zeke Miller in Time.com. It is “chock-full of wedge issues, with each proposal “carefully calibrated to be individually popular.” It allows Democrats to run on the populist issues without “risking a vote” on tax increases that Republicans could exploit. But by rescinding the offer on entitlement reform, said John Avlon in TheDailyBeast.com, Obama has “kicked the can” on the fiscal reform necessary to tackle the country’s looming financial problems.

But expanding the EITC, closing corporate tax loopholes, and funding infrastructure are all areas of common interest, said Jonathan Cohn in NewRepublic.com. Once the Ryan-Murray deal expires in 2015, these proposals could be a basis for fruitful debate on the next budget. And by proposing to expand EITC benefits, Obama is effectively calling the Republicans’ bluff, said Jonathan Chait in NYMag.com. Eager to shed their “royalist image,” Republicans have been touting increased EITC benefits as a better incentive to work than a higher minimum wage. But now that the president has proposed it, the GOP’s enthusiasm will disappear.

This budget will be rejected by “narrow-minded conservative partisans,” said Ron Fournier in NationalJournal.com, just as Ryan’s budget, expected next month, will be “denounced by stubborn liberals.” Both parties fail to recognize that adapting to a global economy, a technological revolution, and massive social change requires innovative, “even radical” thinking. The White House and Congress need to find a new formula for stimulating economic growth while helping people adjust to a rapidly changing, more competitive world. Unfortunately for Americans, “their leaders aren’t up to the job.”