WASHINGTON (AP) – With higher taxes on the wealthy and billions in new spending, President Barack Obama’s no-balance budget lays down an audacious challenge to Republicans who swept to full control of Congress last fall and now claim a mandate to eliminate deficits over the next decade.
Make that the second audacious challenge in the past three weeks – coming after a State of the Union address in which Obama threatened to veto Republican legislative priorities and demanded lawmakers enact his own.
Then, as now, his objective was in part to help Democrats in Congress recover from their election drubbing, and in part to position them and his party as the champion of the middle class in advance of the 2016 campaign. To do that, he tars Republicans as apostles of a “mindless austerity” that has set back the economic recovery and was woven into a recent history that includes a partial government shutdown and flirtation with default.
Policies adopted after Republicans took control of the House in 2011 “hurt, rather than helped, the economy,” his budget says, although it fails to mention that Obama once negotiated seriously if unsuccessfully with Speaker John Boehner over billions of dollars in savings to Social Security and Medicare.
The word “austerity” appears seven times in a 17-page introduction, none of them favorable and usually attributed to Republicans and described as mindless or needless.