The Budget: Obama's next campaign…and Hillary Clinton's warm-up act
"I have no more campaigns to run."
President Obama said it. We do not have to believe it.
Yes, social media judges awarded the 44th President of the United States with the coveted State of the Union "Sick Burn" award for what came next. (I didn't know the Sick Burn award existed, either. Dying to see the trophy.)
Mr. Obama's budget, debuting Monday morning after a build-up twice as long as for Super Bowl XLIX, is the most methodically political of his presidency. The post-recession era has given Obama room to boost spending on guns and butter, propose $650 billion in new taxes, abolish the sequester, seek nearly $500 billion in infrastructure spending and abandon any pretense of pursuing a balanced budget - now or ever. These initiatives and the rhetoric built around them - starting with, but not limited to, "Middle Class Economics" - kickoff the 2016 Democratic campaign.
Yes, that includes Hillary. More precisely and more immediately, it includes Senate Democrats who see bounce-back potential and revenge against the Republican class of 2010 that foreshadowed Sen. Harry Reid's descent to minority leader - a journey that took his caucus from a high of 60 votes in July of 2009 to today's low of 46 (58 and 44, respectively, if you subtract independents aligned with Democrats). But it also sets the terms of the policy debate for Clinton, while her advisers debate when to launch her bid for the White House, with April-versus-July the latest topic for her internal coronation debating society.
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Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, says he believes his party will unify behind former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential pri...
Here are the big numbers: $3.99 trillion budget for fiscal year 2016; projected deficit of $474 billion (2.5 percent of GDP); for the ten-year budget cycle, $650 billion in higher taxes, $277 billion in tax cuts and $400 billion from slowing the growth of mandatory spending; $1.091 trillion in domestic discretionary spending with $561 billion for defense and $530 billion for non-defense accounts; projected yearly GDP of 3.1 percent; projected unemployment rate of 5.4 percent and projected inflation rate of 1.4 percent.
The president no longer feels constrained by deficit-era politics or GOP fretting about the size or economic relevance of the national debt. As an academic matter, he has been there since his Dec. 2011 speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, that branded income inequality as the "defining issue of our time...a make-or-break moment for the middle class."
More than three years later, unemployment has fallen from 8.5 percent to 5.6, annualized economic growth has increased from 1.8 percent to 2.5 percent and the deficit has fallen from $1.3 trillion to $564 billion. That's changed the political climate, though wage growth continues to lag behind pre-recession trends and Mr. Obama's made scant progress on reducing inequality.
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The Budget: Obama's next campaign...and Hillary Clinton's warm-up act