Obama Announces $3.8 Trillion Budget for 2011

President Barack Obama on Monday announced his proposed 2011 budget, which includes boosted spending for creating jobs and waging wars, a potential tax on big banks, funding for infrastructure on the state and city levels … and a whopping $1.6 trillion deficit for the fiscal year. However, the president attempted to soften the impact of the whole giant deficit issue by arguing that it’s a necessary byproduct of his plan to counteract the effects of a “decade of profligacy.” Meanwhile, select and vocal Republicans aren’t buying what Obama’s selling. –KA

Read the transcript of Obama’s budget announcement here.

The New York Times:

President Obama sent Congress on Monday a proposed budget of $3.8 trillion for the fiscal year 2011, saying that his plan would produce a decade-long reduction in the deficit from $1.6 trillion this year, a shortfall swollen by $100 billion in additional tax cuts and public works spending that he is seeking right away.

“We simply cannot continue to spend as if deficits don’t have consequences, as if waste doesn’t matter, as if the hard-earned tax money of the American people can be treated like Monopoly money,” Mr. Obama said at the White House.

But at the end of the decade, the yearly deficits would begin moving up again, as the projected costs of health and retirement programs for an aging population start to escalate, according to forecasts in the administration’s new blueprint.

No budget proposal is ever enacted wholesale by Congress, and the spreadsheet-boggling numbers in the White House plan are sure to produce anguished partisan and ideological debates over how best to address the deficit and the nation’s lingering economic problems between now and the start of the new fiscal year next Oct. 1 — if indeed Congress manages to complete its work by then, right before the midterm elections.

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