Obama's $3.8 Trillion Budget Is a Pre-Election Salvo. By Alexis Simendinger

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Once upon a time, American presidents unveiled their annual budgets to Congress with green-eyeshade seriousness and a certain degree of policy suspense.
But it has been quite a while since President Ford dragged members of his Cabinet with him into the State Department auditorium while he attempted to dazzle reporters with his budgetary know-how about block grants, Medicare reimbursements, and federal funding for ballistic missiles. Ford, running in 1976 for an office he inherited when Richard Nixon resigned, thought his commanding knowledge of the executive branch and of Congress could help him appeal to voters. It didn’t work out that way when a Georgia peanut farmer beat him.

Budgets are where incumbent presidents, at least in the modern age, often run into trouble. Recall magic asterisks, unfunded mandates, evaporating surpluses, and ketchup as a vegetable (President Reagan’s ploy to economize on hot lunches in schools). Federal budgets are easiest to construct in times of peace and prosperity; hardest in times of war and economic crisis -- and when painful policy choices have been deferred by both political parties through several administrations.
And that explains how President Obama came to deliver his $3.8 trillion fiscal 2013 budget to Congress on Monday after basically fleeing Washington. He didn’t go far -- just across the Potomac River to give a speech at a community college in Virginia -- but the fact that he opted to hold his budget event in a swing state and not in the capital spoke volumes.
The president’s fiscal blueprint, which makes a bid to help the middle class at the expense of upper-income Americans, was written with voters in mind, even more than the House Republicans the president and his top aides delighted in taunting.
“Some people go around, they say, ‘Well, the president is engaging in class warfare,’ ” Obama said at Northern Virginia Community College. “That’s not class warfare. . . . Asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary when it comes to his tax rate, that’s just common sense, because Warren Buffet is doing fine. I'm doing fine. We don’t need the tax breaks. You need them. You're the ones who see your wages stall. You're the ones whose costs of everything, from college to groceries, has gone up. You're the ones who deserve a break.”
The president was referring to the administration’s proposed “Buffett rule,” in which no individual earning more than $1 million a year would pay less than a 30 percent effective tax rate. The budget envisions this new rule functioning as a millionaire’s version of an alternative minimum tax to ensure that wealthy Americans -- Mitt Romney became just one example, based on his recently disclosed tax return and estimated liabilities -- pay what most middle-class Americans pay in taxes.
Obama’s budget called on Congress to work with the administration on comprehensive tax reform, but because such a project is considered nearly impossible to accomplish in an election year, the president’s blueprint proposes instead to end a bipartisan assortment of tax loopholes, some new revenue-raisers that would “broaden the tax base,” and the expiration this year of the Bush tax cuts that benefit families earning more than $250,000 a year. All of those proposals, the administration said, could move the tax system closer in fiscal 2013 to achieving the Buffett rule.
Obama’s message Monday was a companion to his Kansas speech in December, and the State of the Union address he gave in January. “The budget we’re releasing today is a reflection of shared responsibility,” he said. “We’ve got to make some choices.”
The president’s goals continue to include new spending for programs that rev job creation and the economy, and a balanced approach to replace spending cuts that he and many in Congress fear will strike the executive branch across-the-board in 2013 -- the residual punishment for not achieving more ambitious and more artful deficit-reduction horse-trading last year.
The $1.2 trillion in across-the-board cuts known as budget sequestration will become law in 2013 if Congress and the president do not work together before January to come up with a substitute. “We firmly believe the sequester [trigger] is bad policy,” said acting Office of Management and Budget Director Jeff Zients. “We believe the sequester should be replaced.” But when asked, he clarified that there are no circumstances under which Obama will sign legislation to amend or alleviate the planned cuts for certain departments, such as the Pentagon, absent a broader, negotiated accord to achieve more than $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years, as provided by law. “The president is not calling for the sequester to be taken away,” Zients said.

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