It’s not officially budget day until Monday, but late Friday senior administration officials walked reporters through the highlights.
You can read an official summary here, but the bullet point version is pretty straight forward.
- Deficit Reduction: $4 trillion over 10 years achieved largely by honoring the July debt limit deal, and by tax reforms that would both allow the Bush tax cuts for top earners to expire, and to enshrine a version of the Buffett rule into law. This section also includes hundreds of billions of dollars in as-yet unspecified cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and other health programs, which will mimic proposals President Obama presented to the Super Committee in September.
- Economic Growth: $350 billion in immediate job creation measures, largely gleaned from renewing the payroll tax cut and emergency unemployment benefits.
- Longer-Term Investments: Affordability programs for education, $140.8 billion for research and development, $476 billion for surface transportation, paid for largely with savings from winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and an infrastructure investment bank.
