Official: Obama plans to slash deficit in half

tony7914 · Joined: Dec 24, 2004 Posts: 4965 Location: Peru Indiana

Quote:

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama has committed hundreds of billions of dollars to help revive the economy and is working on a plan to cut the federal deficit in half by the end of his first term.

Obama will touch on his efforts to restore fiscal discipline at a White House fiscal policy summit on Monday and in an address to Congress on Tuesday. On Thursday he plans to send at least a summary of his first budget request to Capitol Hill. The bottom line, said an administration official Saturday, is to halve the federal deficit to $533 billion by the time his first term ends in 2013. He inherited a deficit of about $1.3 trillion from former President George W. Bush.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the president has not yet released his budget for the fiscal year 2010, which begins Oct. 1, said the deficit will be shrunk by scaling back Iraq war spending, ending the temporary tax breaks enacted by the Bush administration for those making $250,000 or more a year, and streamlining government......

Source.

With all the new spending he's adding to the mix he's going to have to eventually increase taxes a lot more than just reversing the tax cuts Bush rescinded of Clinton's.

On a side note, something that struck me as funny with the spending bill was the 70 million or so they are giving for smoking cessation aside from not belonging in that bill it's going to hurt funding for SCHIPS because most of the funding for that is another large cigarette tax.