Courtesy Greenbaby President Barack Obama unveiled a multi-trillion-dollar spending plan Thursday that would boost taxes on the wealthy, curtail Medicare, lay the groundwork for universal health care and leave a string of deficits dwarfing any in the nation’s history.
In addition to sending Congress his $3.55 trillion budget plan for 2010, Obama proposed more immediate changes that would push spending to $3.94 trillion in the current year.
That would result in a record deficit Obama projects will hit $1.75 trillion, reflecting the massive spending being undertaken to battle a severe recession and the worst financial crisis in seven decades.
But Republicans contended Obama was avoiding hard choices in favor of exploding the deficit and raising taxes.
Christina Romer, head of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, defended the administration forecast, telling reporters at a briefing that the private forecasters may not be taking into account all of the efforts the government is employing to jump-start the economy.
The Medicare plan is sure to incite battles with doctors, hospitals, health insurance companies and drug manufacturers.
The $1.75 trillion deficit projected for this year would represent 12.3 percent of the gross domestic product, double the previous post-war record of 6 percent in 1983, when Ronald Reagan was president, and the highest level since the deficit totaled 21.5 percent of GDP in 1945, at the end of World War II.
In for a penny, in for a pound. Where’s my bailout?
More double talk from the right (the wrong).
Consider:
When Bush borrows a trillion for an elective war the response is “it’s still less than Vietnam on a GDP % basis”
When Obama borrows a trillion to build American infrastructure get out of the current Bush disaster zone, the response is “we ain’t got the money”.
Summary : A bunch of double talking pin heads with no ideas, lots of whining and anxious to get the Palin/Sanjaya ticket off the ground.
An i the only one to be annoyed at being called wealthy by making 250+ k?
#21, I agree. But two wrongs don’t make a right.
@21:”When Obama borrows a trillion to build American infrastructure get out of the current Bush disaster zone, the response is “we ain’t got the money”.”
If he indeed spent most (if not all) of it on real useful infrastructure I’d be jumping of joy and we’d be on a path to recovery. However, when it is spent on the refurbishment of the Govt. buildings, lawns and trains to Las Vegas (never mind mice, pigs and such) it is not real useful infrastructure and it will not start chain of production but just provide small temporary workforce.
There are some useful (but terribly underfunded) infrastructure projects. Why wasn’t every single dime aimed for mice, pigs, lawns,… redirected to high tech infrastructure? Telecommunications, flight control systems, … Why finance train to least productive places like Las Vegas instead of modernizing highly used productive corridors like Chicago, East Coast,… Where is huge chunk of money for high tech military spending (through which we would gain leg up on technological competition around the World)?
# 24 dusanmal said, ”When Obama borrows a trillion to build American infrastructure get out of the current Bush disaster zone,”
You’d have a point except, less than 20% is going towards infrastructure. So, basically, you don’t have a point…
#22,
At 250k you make more than 99% of everyone in US, and more importantly, you make more than me and I am loaded. I own two houses(paid for). A jet Ski, a boat. I get a new computer just about every year. I lease a new cars every two years. I was almost ready to retire until the Bush economy really kicked in.
Yes, you are rich, deal with it. I am rich with my meager 150k a year income.
If you put your mind to it, you could sock away 700k in t-bills and CDs in 5 years and retire, with an awsome income for the rest of your life.
Are you mind boggling lottery winning, billionare inheriting wealthy? No. But you are wealthy, and have an income that transends financial need.
#24. You have good points and I agree with the principle of not spending money on useless ‘projects’.
My response to that is.
(1) Neither you nor I are qualified to conduct our own line item veto of spending. I wish I can be king for a day, but I’m not.
(2) I’m afraid we still have politics and horse trading conducted in government. You can bitch about it all day long, but it’s a fact. OK? Once you internalize that, you can move on to the bigger picture. Note the bridge to nowhere is from the Moosalini state.
#17 “Just a thought … by a Nobel Prize winning economist.”
Let’s not forget that a couple vaunted “Nobel Prize winners” crashed LTCM a decade ago, ushering in this era of moral hazard.
Recklessly spending money we didn’t have got us into this mess. The crash cannot be avoided but the suffering can sure be prolonged. Just ask the Japanese.
Funny how a couple of year ago nobody, especially from the right wing media was ever talking about Bush’s massive debt financed spending. Now that Democrats are in power it is a huge issue.
I get it now. It’s all OBAMA’s deficit. I will now readjust my sense of reality.
re#1
Dallas,
Thanks for explaining so clearly to this Republican. I read it twice, trying not to move my lips or smudge the screen with my finger.
I’m sure you, being a not-Republican are right, since we on our side are all knuckle dragging morons, but maybe you could explain why your simple solution didn’t work in the 1930′s in America, or in the 1990′s in Japan.
But please use very small words, because unlike you, I’m stooo-pid.
Dan
PS Write back soon. I have some minorities I need to oppress. As soon as I’m done beating my children at church, of course.
I love it when people take TODAY’s mess and critique the non-messer-uppers for policies about past messes 20 to 80 years into the past.
Of course, the essence of Republican -ism is that anything can be punished or derided into compliance with the Republican ideal.
(No child left behind, Katrina, Iraq, Go F*** Yourself [Cheney], Them Goddamn Liberals [McCain, Palin, Bush, Cheney, Nixon, Reagan and millions more], suspension of gay rights [wherever possible], anything-gate and countless other examples.
Doesn’t it seem ironical that if you are a Republican, you can solicit consensual male/male sex in an airport bathroom while bellowing anti-gay rhetoric at the top of your lungs, publicly. And have your party pat you on the back for it? But the gay thing is just a side effect.
Argumentum ad hominem, and argumentum ad baculum—both roundly discredited as far back as ancient Greece—are practiced, universally taught tools within the Republican superstructure.
Along comes the ONE GUY who has consistently refused to play these argumentum games, and out come the Big Republican Guns all primed to bash him in the nuts for being so completely incompetent, useless and wrong.
After thirty six days on the job.
Man bites dog. Kettle calls pot black. Penny saved is a drop in the bucket. Film at 11.
I think a truly conservative American political party needs to show up on the US political scene.
One that is interested in, and focused on, conserving the Constitution, money, lives, energy, health, fairness, reason, Mother Earth, freedom and truth.
But such a party would be parsecs away from the current Republican agenda as practiced here today and for the last forty years.
And that’s a through-line that is consistent.
#32, “One that is interested in, and focused on, conserving the Constitution, money, lives, energy, health, fairness, reason, Mother Earth, freedom and truth.”
Wake me up when the aliens take over. Thanks.
Pork Pork Pork Pork Pork
Let’s spend all our children’s money in hopes of spending our way out of this.
Please Messiah I need gas for my car…..
Here’s a tip for all of you.
Weapons and ammo
This budget deficit number is bogus. Obama said he would go line by line through the budget and eliminate wasteful spending. He hasn’t done that yet, and when he does, the 1.75 trillion number will disappear.
Well, we all know that democrats can’t stand to be behind the republican administration in spending. I guess they wanted to set the spending bar so high this time that it would never be beaten again.
#34
So you were happy to pay for a wars in Iraq but when it comes ‘stimuli’, your reaching for your weapons?
Sound like party political nonsense to me.
#5 the only surplus Bush left Obama was the left over pocket change he left in the desk of the oval office, and forgot about.
What would the budget be with the old (GWB) accounting style?
It has been estimated that the US government’s debt limit will be increased by 63% within next two financial years. So keeping that in mind Mr.Obama has announced the budget. But at present the word “peace” is in danger worldwide. Specially after the case of 26/11. So, if Mr.President would have considered a huge chunk of money for high tech military spending then it would have strengthened the security of our US and I think it should be given the first priority now.