Budget as Blueprint

“The budget is Obama’s most detailed expression yet of where he wants to take the country,” Politico reports. So where are we heading? In total, the Obama plan accounts for about $2 trillion in new revenue—$1.3 trillion from new taxes on households earning more than $250,000 a year and about $650 billion from revenues from a new carbon “cap-and-trade” climate change policy. Obama would return about $940 billion of this new revenue as tax breaks to working and middle-class families and small businesses. On the spending side, the budget creates a $634 billion reserve fund as a down payment on future health care reforms.