WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama says that while the details may change, any budget passed by Congress must cut the deficit, reform health care, invest in education and reduce US dependence on foreign oil.
After a week dominated by outrage over enormous corporate bonuses at bailed-out companies, Obama used his weekly radio and Internet address to turn the focus back on his budget proposal and getting it through Congress.
But even as he outlined his four key requirements for a spending plan that would top $3.6 trillion for the 2010 fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, there was growing unease on Capitol Hill over a budget that congressional auditors say will generate $9.3 trillion in deficits over the next decade, an eye-popping figure that threatens his ambitious goals. The new Congressional Budget Office figures that emerged Friday offered a far more dire outlook for Obama’s budget than the new administration predicted just last month — a deficit $2.3 trillion worse.
“I realize there are those who say these plans are too ambitious to enact,” Obama said. “To that I say that the challenges we face are too large to ignore. I didn’t come here to pass on our problems to the next president or the next generation — I came here to solve them.”
Republicans, however, slammed Obama’s budget as a breathtaking spending spree. As states and families are struggling to cut spending, the president’s budget “spends too much, taxes too much and borrows too much,” said Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, in the weekly Republican address.
Obama spent two days in California this week taking his sales pitch directly to the people. The campaign took him from town-hall meetings to Jay Leno’s “The Tonight Show” set in an effort to garner support for a budget that will pay for his key priorities. At the same time, he is promising to cut the deficit in half by the end of his four-year term.
His message, however, was drowned out for much of the week by revelations that American International Group Inc. paid out $165 million in bonuses to employees, including to traders in the financial unit that nearly caused the insurance giant’s collapse. The public outrage was followed by congressional efforts to impose punitive taxes on those payouts. In his yesterday’s message, Obama contended that ordinary Americans are more concerned about having a paycheck and being able to pay their college or medical bills more than they are about «the news of the day in Washington.”