The President’s Budget: A Misguided Mission Statement

[xchrom]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/04/10

Today, the president releases his budget for fiscal year 2014, the year that begins this October. Commentators and advocates will pour over its disparate parts, although the White House has already leaked its major contours.

This document is less a budget for government than a purpose statement of the administration. In this divided government, it is already “dead on arrival.” That’s particularly true this year since the Senate and House have each passed its own budget outline. For all of its volumes and detail, the president’s budget is at best a statement of his priorities. And there it is distinctively disappointing.

The president’s major purpose is not to address mass unemployment, not to build a new foundation for the economy, not to revive the middle class or redress Gilded Age inequality. The president’s overriding priority is to cut a deal – and a deal that continues to impose austerity on an already faltering recovery.

So he releases a budget that the White House admits is “not ideal.” It is framed around preemptive concessions to get a deal – or to show that the president is not at fault if one is not forthcoming. The budget would replace the mindless sequester spending cuts, while cutting as much in spending – about $1.2 trillion over 10 years – in less randomly destructive ways. It offers Republicans what they have tried to extort – structural cuts in Social Security benefits (by lowering the inflation adjustment) and savings from Medicare. It embraces the Republican position on corporate tax reform – lowering rates and closing loopholes without gaining any new revenue, asking the corporations that are enjoying record profits to offer exactly nothing to deficit reduction. In exchange, it seeks a modest $580 billion in new revenue over 10 years, largely by closing loopholes for the wealthy