President Barack Obama (White House photo)
The Hill is reporting that the White House has been working with base groups to
prepare them for a budget they won't like. That the budget won't be pretty shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone; the debt ceiling deal agreed to last year means President Obama has to come up with cuts to meet a $1.047 trillion spending cap.
The article doesn't specify what in this budget will particularly piss off the left, but we've got some clues from previous offerings from the White House, including raising the Medicare eligibility age and chained CPI, a new, less generous, formula for calculating cost of living adjustments. Those are seemingly the likeliest cuts the White House is preparing the left to hate.
To blunt that inevitable opposition from his base, The Hill article tells us that the White House has heard our complaints, and will change its message.
Obama staffers sought to present their budget plan as a glass half full. According to sources familiar with the briefings, they promised that the president will focus on jobs and the economy, instead of deficit-cutting, which dominated last year’s debate on Capitol Hill. [...]
Liberal groups are pleased that the president has indicated he will shift away from the discussion of deficits and spending cuts that last year overshadowed the jobs agenda they preferred to emphasize.
“We’ve seen the pendulum go back and forth between deficits and jobs,” said one liberal advocate. “We want the president to focus on jobs and economic security and went away feeling confident the president will do that.”
But that could be a double-edged sword as well, as David Dayen details in looking at the recommendations from the President's Jobs Council, which is pushing corporate tax cuts, drilling and regulatory rollbacks as job creation strategies.
President Barack Obama’s jobs council is calling for a corporate tax overhaul, expanded domestic drilling and new regulatory reforms, a set of proposals unlikely to provide a quick fix for high unemployment or gain much traction in an election year. [...]
The panel calls for lowering corporate tax rates to “internationally competitive levels” while broadening the corporate tax base by eliminating deductions and loopholes.
“The Jobs Council recommends expanding and expediting the domestic production of fossil fuels—including allowing more access to oil, gas, and coal opportunities on federal lands—while ensuring safe and responsible development of those sites,” the report said.
Perhaps the President's Jobs Council is angling for a Republican president. They're certainly providing a GOP platform in their wishlist. Hopefully the White House will tell the Jobs Council "thanks, but no thanks" on this set of recommendations. Yes, we need a focus on jobs, but this one would do absolutely nothing to mollify a base disgruntled over spending cuts.