President
Barack Obama would almost double spending on the U.S. infrastructure
over the next six years and would pour $350 billion into a jobs plan
while shrinking the budgets of most other domestic agencies.
The
blueprint for the fiscal 2013 budget released today would spend $476
billion through 2018 on highway, bridge and mass transit projects,
funded in part by winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It cuts
some energy programs, farm subsidies and federal workers’ retirement
plans, while bulking up the Securities and Exchange Commission and
creating a new panel to investigate unfair foreign trade practices.
Investing
in the nation’s transportation grid is a fresh attempt to create jobs
for a president facing re-election this year amid voter concern about
the economy and unemployment at 8.3 percent in January. In addition to
gasoline tax revenue, transportation spending would come from a $38.5
billion-a-year transfer from the fund that now goes to war spending.
“Most
Americans understand that a crumbling infrastructure is not the way to
build an economy that can last,” White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew
said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program. “We need to make sure we
have a manufacturing base in this country” and workers with appropriate
skills, said Lew, the former White House budget director.
Obama’s
proposals for discretionary spending must adhere to August’s Budget
Control Act, which imposed spending caps that the administration
estimates will generate about $1 trillion in deficit reduction over the
next decade.
Less bombs, more bridges. Makes sense to me.
With
a Republican-controlled House of Representatives, the document has
little chance of becoming law. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell
said “no,” when asked yesterday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” if Obama’s
budget had any change of passage in that chamber.
Please
note that this was technically saying no the day before the plan came
out. We need MOAR CRAZY HOSTAGE TAKING if we're going to have a real
budget. But things are so bad for the GOP right now that what I thought was the obvious plan, attaching legislation to exempt all employers from having to provide coverage if they reject it on religious grounds, to the payroll tax cut extension?
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