President Obama’s budget request would raise taxes by nearly $1 trillion compared with current law and cut spending by nearly $200 billion, congressional budget analysts said Friday.
All told, the president’s most recent request, released in April, would reduce projected borrowing by more than $1.1 trillion over the next decade, pushing the national debt below 70 percent of the overall economy by 2023, the Congressional Budget Office said.
Those figures differ sharply from the White House presentation of the president’s budget, which was touted upon its release as reducing borrowing by $1.8 trillion over the next decade and proposing only $600 billion in new taxes.
However, the difference is due primarily to the scope of the analysis. When they released the president’s budget, White House officials focused attention almost exclusively on a compromise deficit-reduction plan that Obama offered Republican leaders.
In its report released Friday, the nonpartisan CBO analyzed the entire White House budget, including various proposals outside of that offer, such as plan to make prekindergarten classes more widely available and to cover the cost by raising taxes on cigarettes by nearly $1 a pack.
