Copies of President Barack Obama's proposed federal budget plan for fiscal year 2014 are prepared for delivery??
President Barack Obama on Wednesday unveils his latest budget?a symbolic document that doesn?t directly decide government spending, won?t pass Congress, and isn?t likely to do much to create jobs. No budget does that by itself.
But the non-binding blueprint already has done something that the president himself has only rarely accomplished since taking office: It?s basically united Washington. In opposition.
Republican House Speaker John Boehner has repeatedly attacked the plan, based on carefully calculated disclosures from the White House about what the plan is expected to include. At the other end of the spectrum, Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders has promised to fight against Obama?s call for adopting a less generous cost-of-living formula for entitlements such as Social Security.
Other Democrats are perplexed by and annoyed at the White House strategy, which they view as a premature compromise.
Obama himself doesn?t even sound that rah-rah about the document.
"It?s not my ideal plan to further reduce the deficit, it?s a compromise I?m willing to accept," the president said in his weekly address on Saturday. "It includes ideas many Republicans have said they could accept as well. It?s a way we can make progress together."
Despite all of that, the document could still matter.
While budgets serve chiefly as political mission statements for presidents, and political punching bags for their opponents, they can still cast a long shadow over public debates. And there's no shortage of urgency for Washington to do something in the face of sluggish economic growth and unsettlingly weak job creation.
?The timeline between the submission of a president?s budget and someone saying the phrase ?dead on arrival? is the shortest measure of time in Washington,? Tony Fratto, a spokesman for George W. Bush?s Treasury Department and later his White House, joked to Yahoo News.
But Fratto still calls himself ?a big believer? in the process. Why?
?They are the aspirational game plans for each party. It?s the way they would like to see the world, lays out markers for the programs they consider priorities,? Fratto said.
And by offering to cut entitlement spending?a key driver of U.S. government deficits and the debt?in exchange for new tax increases that chiefly target the well-off, Obama aims to bridge the gap between Republicans and Democrats and restart so-called "grand bargain" talks aimed at finding $4 trillion in deficit reduction over the next 10 years. Obama aides, though, say that any big deal has to include new revenues, something that makes Republicans balk.
The White House says that, if reflected in spending legislation, Obama's new budget would cut $1.8 trillion over 10 years. Republicans say the real figure is $600 billion because the budget replaces existing so-called "sequestration" spending cuts of $1.2 trillion with an equivalent amount.
But both sides agree the budget does not balance over its 10-year horizon. The House-passed GOP budget does so thanks to mostly undetailed spending cuts to mostly unidentified programs.
The White House budget predicts that the deficit will run $744 billion in fiscal year 2014 (which starts Oct. 1). That's about 4.4 percent of gross domestic product. And senior administration officials, briefing reporters on condition of anonymity, said Tuesday that it would fall to 2.8 percent of GDP by 2016 and 1.7 percent by 2023. They did not give a dollar figure, which means those estimates could rely on rosy predictions of economic growth that are typical in any president's budget.
Budgets serve as guidelines, sometimes influential ones, but they don't become law. Actual spending levels for individual agencies are supposed to come in a two-step legislative process of authorizing programs and then appropriating funds for them, though this spring it?ll be in the form of a catch-all ?continuing resolution.?
All this is to say that, when you hear a politician compare a government budget to a family budget, that?s only true if your family disregards its budget.
One early test of whether the GOP?anyone in the GOP?is willing to consider Obama's offer will come Wednesday night, when he is scheduled to host 12 Republican senators for a fence-mending dinner where the budget will surely be discussed.
But Fratto warned there might not be an opportunity for a major budget breakthrough even if both sides want it, thanks to a deal reached during the so-called "fiscal cliff" negotiations in early January where Republicans agreed to raise taxes on higher earners.
A major budget agreement "may be too much to ask because I don?t know that the components of a grand bargain exists any more since the tax increase deal, tax cut deal, whatever you want to call it," Fratto said.
In that accord, Republicans agreed to extend Bush-era income tax cuts on income up to $400,000 for individuals and $450,000 for households. Since then, GOP leaders have publicly ruled out new tax hikes even as the White House has pushed for raising revenues, notably by closing loopholes and slicing into deductions for wealthier Americans.
"What we?re left with now is a situation where all of the components of a so-called grand bargain cause pain for somebody?except for inside-the-beltway deficit hawks," Fratto said. "It would be some combination of tax increases, entitlements cuts, discretionary spending cuts, so who are the winners?"
One possibility is that Obama views a "grand bargain" as a way to polish his legacy?he would be The Democratic President Who Reined In Entitlement Spending. He still has the "bully pulpit"?the ability to dominate the national political conversation.
Whether Democrats see it that way and are prepared to run the political risks to help the White House is an open question.
Party strategists say they got clubbed like baby seals in the 2010 mid-term elections in large part because of GOP ads accusing the president's party of wanting to cut Medicare. That line of attack was based on Democratic support for Obamacare, which reduced Medicare spending by $716 billion, mostly taken from insurance companies and hospitals rather than beneficiaries.
And the 2014 mid-terms aren't that far away.
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