Military Cuts and Tax Plan Are Central to Obama's Campaign Platform, I Mean Strategically Proposed Budget

Article: Military Cuts and Tax Plan Are Central to Obama Budget

Source: New York Times

President's final budget request of his term amounts to his agenda for a desired second term, with tax increases on the affluent and cuts in spending, especially from the military, both to reduce deficits and to pay for priorities like education, public works, research and clean energy. The budget request for the 2013 fiscal year, which starts Oct. 1, and its projections for the years that follow, reflect Mr. Obama’s vision for another term in which he would switch from years of temporary stimulus measures to promoting long-term initiatives to spur new business and manufacturing activity and help educate Americans for new skills that businesses demand. 

And Mr. Obama once again proposed to narrow inequality in income and opportunity between high- and lower-income Americans, while also reducing annual deficits, through his proposals to raise $1.5 trillion over 10 years mostly from the wealthy but also from closing some corporate tax breaks, chiefly for oil and gas companies. Overhauling the tax codes would be a priority in a second Obama term. Later this month, the administration will propose a revision of the corporate tax code to root out many tax breaks and lower the 35 percent rate, though Mr. Obama said the change must not raise any more revenues than the current system, despite the nation’s chronic deficits.

While many of his ideas are retreads of proposals Republicans and some Democrats have blocked before, for the first time Mr. Obama proposed to tax dividends like ordinary income for taxpayers who make more than $250,000, as dividends were before the Bush administration. The change, which would nearly double the rate for affluent taxpayers to 39.6 percent from 20 percent, would raise about $206 billion over 10 years.

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What really strikes me about this article is that while covering Mr. Obama's tax plan, the author drew connections to the repetition in Obama's previous promises to the voting electorate. I say the voting electorate, because he is merely reaching out to his base during this tax plan in preparation for the upcoming election in the fall. Which the author in addition pointed out his platform. “The real work begins in November, and right now these opening moves are just pawns shifting on the chessboard,”  Jim Kessler, vice president for policy at Third Way, a centrist policy organization added. “As a deficit hawk, I’m guardedly optimistic about this budget.” Another key note to make in exaggerating the point that this tax plan is an election pawn is that Mr. Obama traveled to Northern Virginia Community College near Washington to unveil his budget before a gymnasium packed with the sort of young voters his re-election campaign is courting.