Obama’s Budget: Oil Tax, Bombs, Cancer and 8 Other Takeaways

Even with the increased taxes, Obama’s budget projects sharply higher deficits in the near future, totaling $9.8 trillion over the next decade.

“It’s tempting to adopt the conventional wisdom that a president’s final budget isn’t relevant, but I think the conventional wisdom is wrong”, said Shaun Donovan, director of the White House budget office.

The budget must still be approved by a Republican Congress in a year in which the GOP hopes to take back the White House so it can write its own budgets beginning with the 2018 fiscal year.

“The question really for Republicans at this point is, are they going to do anything?” “This isn’t even a budget so much as it is a progressive manual for growing the federal government at the expense of hardworking Americans”.

Yet there may be opportunities for bipartisan work on a short list of items, including cancer research, addressing an epidemic of opioid abuse and overhauling criminal sentencing laws.

Roughly $3 billion of the funding would go toward an information technology modernization fund, which would update the computer systems used by federal agencies.

The budget proposal also allocates $1.3 billion to tackling global climate change risks, including $750 million to help economically challenged countries cope with the effects of climate change.

When President Obama submitted his proposed budget one year ago, he claimed that he wanted to do away with the “mindless austerity” of the sequestration, which had provided some measure of limitation on government spending.

“The president’s FY 2017 transportation budget proposal is an explicit admission that he and the Congress did not provide long-term sustainability for Highway Trust Fund programs when they enacted the FAST (Fixing America’s Surface Transportation) Act in December”, Mr. Ruane said.

The budget deal set Pentagon spending at $583 billion for 2017.

Obama wants $7.5 billion to fight Islamic State, a 50 percent increase that includes money to pay for more than 45,000 GPS-guided smart bombs.

The budget seeks $19 billion for cyber security investments across the USA government. This year, as he calls for more than $245 billion in new or expanded tax breaks for middle and low-income families, he’d also like to raise more than $900 billion in new revenue from the wealthiest.

To help counter the worsening deficit outlook, the plan proposes increasing taxes by $2.6 trillion over the next decade, nearly double the amount of new taxes Obama asked for and failed to get previous year, according to ABC News.

The tax would be paid by oil companies in order to boost spending on transportation infrastructure, including mass transit and high-speed rail, and autonomous vehicles.

The $10-per-barrel tax on oil, he said, “is exactly the type of solution that is necessary going forward”. The following is a summary of some of the investments in the proposal: 1.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Energy Information Administration will release its weekly stockpile report, which will likely support the API’s inventory estimate, offering more downward pressure on prices.

The proposal runs $196 billion more than did 2016’s, while projecting a deficit of $503 billion – $113 billion less than a year ago.