BO continues his amalgamation of FDR and Carter's economic policies to 
the cheering of George Soros and the far left.  The playbook is full 
liberalism:  run a deficit so high that you convince the masses that the 
only way to reduce it is to raise taxes.  Now you have high inflation 
coupled with high taxation.  Economically this is called stagflation.  
The next phase is predictable.  Government receipts will initially go up 
and then sharply downward as economic activity slowly grinds to a halt.  
At the rate this inexperienced president is heading, he will fulfill his 
prophecy of us being in a depression by his own actions.  FDR did the 
same thing.  This is what happens when liberals rewrite history and 
inexperience presidents are at the wheel with a willing congress.  Start 
playing Taps, the geese laying the golden eggs for this country are  
about to be slaughtered.


===============================================

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2009/02/21/AR2009022100911_pf.html

Obama's First Budget Seeks To Trim Deficit
Plan Would Cut War Spending, Increase Taxes on the Wealthy

By Lori Montgomery and Ceci Connolly
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, February 22, 2009; A01



President Obama is putting the finishing touches on an ambitious first 
budget that seeks to cut the federal deficit in half over the next four 
years, primarily by raising taxes on businesses and the wealthy and by 
slashing spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, administration 
officials said.

In addition to tackling a deficit swollen by the $787 billion stimulus 
package and other efforts to ease the nation's economic crisis, the 
budget blueprint will press aggressively for progress on the domestic 
agenda Obama outlined during the presidential campaign. This would 
include key changes to environmental policies and a major expansion of 
health coverage that he hopes to enact later this year.

A summary of Obama's budget request for the fiscal year that begins in 
October will be delivered to Congress on Thursday, with the complete, 
multi-hundred-page document to follow in April. But Obama plans to 
unveil his goals for scaling back record deficits and rebuilding the 
nation's costly and inefficient health care system tomorrow, when he 
addresses lawmakers and budget experts at a White House summit on 
restoring "fiscal responsibility" to Washington.

Yesterday in his weekly radio and Internet address, Obama said he is 
determined to "get exploding deficits under control" and said his budget 
request is "sober in its assessments, honest in its accounting, and lays 
out in detail my strategy for investing in what we need, cutting what we 
don't, and restoring fiscal discipline."

Reducing the deficit, he said, is critical: "We can't generate sustained 
growth without getting our deficits under control."

Obama faces the long-term challenge of retirement and health programs 
that threaten to bankrupt the government years down the road, as well as 
the more immediate problem of deficits bloated by spending on the 
economy and financial system bailouts. His budget proposal takes aim at 
the short-term problem, administration officials said, but also would 
begin to address the nation's chronic budget imbalance by squeezing 
savings from federal health programs for the elderly and the poor.

Even before Congress approved the stimulus package this month, 
congressional budget analysts forecast that this year's deficit would 
approach $1.2 trillion -- 8.3 percent of the overall economy, the 
highest since World War II. With the stimulus and other expenses, some 
analysts say, the annual gap between federal spending and income could 
reach $2 trillion when the fiscal year ends in September.

Obama proposes to dramatically reduce those numbers, said White House 
budget director Peter Orszag: "We will cut the deficit in half by the 
end of the president's first term." The plan would keep the deficit 
hovering near $1 trillion in 2010 and 2011, but shows it dropping to 
$533 billion by 2013, he said -- still high but a more manageable 3 
percent of the economy.

To get there, Obama proposes to cut spending and raise taxes. The 
savings would come primarily from "winding down the war" in Iraq, a 
senior administration official said. The budget assumes continued 
spending on "overseas military contingency operations" throughout 
Obama's presidency, the official said, but that number is lower than the 
nearly $190 billion budgeted for Iraq and Afghanistan last year.

Obama also seeks to increase tax collections, mainly by making good on 
his promise to eliminate some of the temporary tax cuts enacted in 2001 
and 2003. While the budget would keep the breaks that benefit middle-
income families, it would eliminate them for wealthy taxpayers, defined 
as families earning more than $250,000 a year. Those tax breaks would be 
permitted to expire on schedule in 2011. That means the top tax rate 
would rise from 35 percent to 39.6 percent, the tax on capital gains 
would jump to 20 percent from 15 percent for wealthy filers and the tax 
on estates worth more than $3.5 million would be maintained at the 
current rate of 45 percent.

Obama also proposes "a fairly aggressive effort on tax enforcement" that 
would target corporate loopholes, the official said. And Obama's budget 
seeks to tax the earnings of hedge fund managers as normal income rather 
than at the lower 15 percent capital gains rate.

Overall, tax collections under the plan would rise from about 16 percent 
of the economy this year to 19 percent in 2013, while federal spending 
would drop from about 26 percent of the economy, another post-World War 
II high, to 22 percent.

Republicans, who are already painting Obama as a profligate spender, are 
laying plans to attack him on taxes as well. Even some nonpartisan 
observers question the wisdom of announcing a plan to raise taxes in the 
midst of a recession. But senior White House adviser David Axelrod said 
in an interview that the proposals reflect the ideas that won the 
election.

"This is consistent with what the president talked about throughout the 
campaign," and "restores some balance to the tax code in a way that 
protects the middle class," Axelrod said. "Most Americans will come out 
very well here."

The budget also puts in place the building blocks of what administration 
officials say will be a broad restructuring of the U.S. health system, 
an effort aimed at covering some of the estimated 46 million Americans 
who lack insurance while controlling costs and improving quality.

"The budget will kick off or facilitate a focus on getting health care 
done this year," the senior official said, adding that the White House 
is planning a health care summit. The event has been delayed by former 
senator Thomas A. Daschle's decision to withdraw from consideration as 
health secretary because of tax problems, a move that left Obama without 
a key member of his health team.

Administration officials and outside experts say the most likely path to 
revamping the health system is to begin with Medicare, the federal 
program for retirees and people with disabilities, and Medicaid, which 
serves the poor. Together, the two programs cover about 100 million 
people at a cost of $561 billion in 2007. Making policy changes in those 
programs -- such as rewarding physicians who computerize their medical 
records or paying doctors for results rather than procedures -- could 
improve care while generating long-term savings, experts say.

Obama's budget request would create "running room for health reform," 
the official said, by reducing spending on some health programs so the 
administration would have money to devote to initiatives to expand 
coverage. The biggest target is bonus payments to insurance companies 
that run managed-care programs under Medicare, known as Medicare 
Advantage.

The Bush-era program has attracted nearly a quarter of Medicare 
beneficiaries to private health insurance plans that cover a package of 
services such as doctor visits, prescription drugs and eyeglasses. But 
the government pays the plans 13 to 17 percent more than it pays for 
traditional fee-for-service coverage, according to the Medicare Payment 
Advisory Commission, which advises Congress on Medicare financing 
issues.

Officials also are debating whether to permit people as young as 55 to 
purchase coverage through Medicare. That age group is particularly 
vulnerable in today's weakened economy, as many have lost jobs or seen 
insurance premiums rise rapidly. The cost would depend on whether 
recipients received a discount or were required to pay the full price.

In addition to the substantive proposals, Obama's team boasts of 
improving the budget process itself. For years, budget analysts 
complained that former president George W. Bush tried to make his 
deficits look smaller by excluding cost estimates for the war in Iraq 
and domestic disasters, minimizing the cost of payments to Medicare 
doctors and assuming that millions more families would pay the costly 
alternative minimum tax. Obama has banned those techniques, the senior 
official said.

Staff writer Shailagh Murray contributed to this report.

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Patriotism is not who can leak the most Secret documents to the NY Times ...

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