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Today President Obama will deliver his whopping $4 trillion budget to Congress. President Barack Obama sent Congress a record $4 trillion budget Monday that would boost taxes on higher-income Americans and corporations, pushing past tight federal spending caps to fund an ambitious public works program and provide middle-class tax relief. Obama's budget, which will set off months of wrangling in Congress, proposes spending $4 trillion — $3.999 trillion before rounding — in the 2016 budget year that begins Oct. 1. That's a 6.4 percent increase over estimated spending this year, projecting that the deficit will decline to $474 billion. POLITICO...

Jason Lange and Howard Schneider, Reuters Feburary 2, 2015WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Beneath President Barack Obama's plan to fight income inequality lies a gloomy view of an economy that is growing slower and creating fewer rewards for its workers than it did in much of the last century. In a budget proposal unveiled on Monday, the White House cut forecasts for an array of economic variables, depicting less growth, weaker inflation and lower interest rates than officials expected only a year ago. This comes despite an unemployment rate that the Obama administration expects to hit the 5.2 percent level considered to...

WASHINGTON — President Obama presented a budget on Monday that is more utopian vision than pragmatic blueprint. It proposes a politically improbable reshaping of the tax code and generous new social spending initiatives that would shift resources from the wealthy to the middle class. Absent from the plan is any pretense of trying to address the main drivers of the long-term debt — Social Security and Medicare — a quest that has long divided both parties and ultimately proved impossible. The document instead indicates that Mr. Obama, after years of being hemmed in on his fiscal priorities because of politics...

President Obama said Monday he will reject any budget from Congress that doesn’t boost spending on both defense and his own domestic priorities, saying the spending “sequesters” need to go. “America can’t afford being short-sighted and I’m not going to allow it,” the president said while speaking at the Homeland Security Department as he released his $4 trillion budget for fiscal 2016. His budget calls for boosting discretionary spending by more than 6 percent, and raising taxes to pay for it. Those proposals have been panned on Capitol Hill, where Republicans control both the House and Senate and have rejected...

President Obama sent Congress an ambitious budget plan Monday that includes a half-trillion-dollar public works program and an array of tax increases meant to fund a host of other agenda items -- in what Republicans are ripping as a tax-and-spend document that does little to restrain the soaring $18 trillion debt. The president's $4 trillion budget hinges on what Obama calls "middle-class economics," seeking tax breaks for many Americans while imposing increases on top earners, corporations and particularly the financial sector. Referring to proposed spending on everything from roads to education initiatives, Obama said, "We can afford to make these...

President Barack Obama on Monday proposed a $3.99 trillion budget for fiscal year 2016 that sets up a battle with Republicans over programs to boost the middle class that are funded by higher taxes on corporations and wealthy Americans. The budget foresees a $474 billion deficit, which is 2.5 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. It projects deficits stabilizing at that rate over a 10-year period, senior administration officials said. Obama's budget fleshes out proposals from his State of the Union address last month and helps highlight Democratic priorities for the last two years of his presidency and the beginning...

WASHINGTON (AP) — After a year of relative peace in Washington's budget battles, President Barack Obama will lay out a $4 trillion budget on Monday that needles Republicans with proposals for higher taxes on the wealthy and businesses to pay for education, public works projects and child care. The plan, expected to be dismissed by GOP lawmakers now running Capitol Hill, rolls out as the deficit is dropping and Obama's poll numbers inch higher. Though Republicans will march ahead on their own, they ultimately must come to terms with Obama, whose signature is needed on anything that is going to...

Gov. Scott Walker is praising fellow Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan for the congressman's role in broking a bipartisan budget bill that's been blasted a by number of conservatives. Walker said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that Ryan provided strong leadership on the bill that passed the House Thursday and awaits Senate action.

The statement said the automatic spending cuts, known in Washington as "sequestration," had hurt the U.S. economy and its military. Obama, the White House said, will seek to "fully reverse" cuts in domestic spending while providing equal spending boosts for military and national security programs.

President Obama Thursday touted the looming release of his federal budget, urging Republicans to support a slate of tax increases to pay for his economic blueprint for the middle class. “We have to choose what we want that future to look like,” Obama said in an op-ed published by the Huffington Post. “Will we accept an economy where only a few of us do spectacularly well? Or will we commit ourselves to an economy that generates rising incomes and rising chances for everyone who makes the effort?” The president is calling for a 7 percent spending hike in fiscal 2016,...

McManus is a mechanical engineer and his wife Mairee is a surgical physician's assistant, as well as the primary earner. He breaks out his budget by week. In 2014, they brought home an average after-tax household income of $14,735 a month. In the chart below, check out their average monthly spending for 2013, 2014, and predicted for 2015. Note that these are averages, so a single month isn't depicted.

The Milwaukee Business Journal is reporting that Gov. Scott Walker will include a jock tax in the next budget to help fund a new Milwaukee arena project for the Milwaukee Bucks. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is preparing to propose diverting revenue from taxes on NBA players for public funding of a new arena in downtown Milwaukee, sources close to the situation told the Milwaukee Business Journal. In June 2014 Walker said in an interview with the Milwaukee Business Journal that he was studying the possibility of tapping NBA players' income tax for arena construction funding, a so-called "jock tax." Since...

Madison — Setting up a likely legal fight in the federal courts, Gov. Scott Walker is proceeding with his plan to ensure that drug users aren't getting food stamp or jobless benefits. Fulfilling a campaign promise, the Republican governor committed Thursday to putting the proposal in his next budget but provided few new details on how he would pursue a plan that could run afoul of federal rules in programs such as food stamps and unemployment insurance. For the first time, he did commit to offering free treatment and job training for those testing positive for drugs, but he offered...

President Obama wants to toss the sequestration agreement he made with Republcians in 2011 and is proposing an increase of at least $68 billion in the FY 2016 budget. As imperfect as it is, sequestration has been partly successful in reigning in government spending. It could have worked better if Congress wasn't always carving out exemptions. But there's no doubt that there are tens of billions of dollars that would have been spent without it. With tax receipts at an all time high, rather than applying that money to reducing the deficit, the president - as every Democratic president...

Some conservatives are disappointed by Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s apparent reluctance to push for right-to-work legislation in his new term. Today the Wall Street Journal joins the chorus, calling it “unfortunate that he’s ducking a chance to make Wisconsin the country’s 25th right-to-work state.” But Walker has made it clear that such legislation is not a priority and that he wants to focus instead on education reform and on cutting Wisconsin’s woefully bloated budget. Walker is right, and it demonstrates yet again that he’s got the right formula for conservative reforms. As Walker explained to me last May, Wisconsin is...

Over the last 15 years, California racked up three small surpluses, two break-evens and 10 huge deficits. “There’s not a lot of money left in the budget,” said Gov. Jerry Brown regarding the $164.7 billion budget unveiled Friday. “It’s very tight.” The real reason money is tight is Brown and the Democratic legislature increased spending by five percent in a period when inflation is averaging 1.3 percent. California’s proposed spending will jump $5.8 billion more than inflation.

A U.S.-funded power plant and fueling station at an Afghan military complex in Kabul were barely functioning nearly two years after contractors finished building them, a watchdog report said. Another U.S.-backed project, a dining hall for soldiers at the Afghan National Army’s Camp Commando, was serving more than five times the number of people it was built to handle. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction encountered difficulty in inspecting the three facilities due to lost records that would have shown when they were tested and commissioned in its report on the camp. Together, the power plant, fueling station and...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives voted on Tuesday to incorporate macroeconomic projections into cost estimates for major legislation, a move that critics say could hide the true budgetary effects of tax cuts. The move toward "dynamic scoring" is part of a package of new rules that passed on a 234-172 party-line vote as the new Republican-controlled Congress started its work.

When Republicans swept control of the Michigan House, Senate and Governor's office in a November 2010 electoral "trifecta," the national media took notice. In early 2011, the New York Times wrote a story titled: “Michigan Governor Proposes Budget Cuts and Lower Taxes.” However, in four years of Republican governance under Gov. Rick Snyder with GOP majorities in both the House and Senate, state spending from state taxes and fees has increased by $2.7 billion. The overall budget (including federal dollars) has spiked by $4.7 billion. In the first budget enacted under GOP control in 2011-12, state spending from state sources...

If you thought the lame-duck Congress that met in December -- in which House Speaker John Boehner cut a deal with President Barack Obama to fund almost all of Obama's programs through the rest of the current fiscal year -- was a bad deal for America, wait until the next lame-duck Congress convenes after the 2016 election. That could be the "bipartisan" moment for a bailout of the federal disability program -- and perhaps Social Security with it. The very dry, very long Annual Report of the Board of Trustees of Social Security, released in July, included two crucial predictions....