WASHINGTON -With the $3.55 trillion budget outline unveiled yesterday, President Barack Obama finally showed where he's prepared to spend his political capital and what the battle lines will be in the months ahead.
It was the political equivalent of an "all in" moment in a high-stakes poker game.
After weeks of appealing for bipartisanship and selecting Cabinet secretaries and other officials that worried some of his most liberal supporters in the process, the president came out into the open with his new budget plan.
And he laid down controversial markers on almost every major issue facing the country, saying that only bold action now can end the current economic crisis and set the U.S. on the path to long-term prosperity.
"The time has come to usher in a new era - a new era of responsibility in which we act not only to save and create new jobs, but also to lay a new foundation of growth upon which we can renew the promise of America," Obama wrote in the preface. "This budget is a first step in that journey."
The fiscal 2010 budget will rack up a $1.17 trillion deficit, in the wake of an estimated $1.75 trillion deficit for 2009 - a shortfall that Obama described as unfortunate but necessary in the short term to jump start the economy.
"We inherited these twin trillion-dollar deficits," budget director Peter Orszag said, noting that two stimulus packages aimed at the continuing economic crisis were big contributors to the flood of red ink.
Mindful of costs, the budget tries to launch some of Obama's signature initiatives - such as a "cap-and-trade" program to combat global warming and proposals for reducing health care costs - by paying for them with new revenues described as fair policy trade-offs.
Obama also plans to plow new money into aiding college students and reshaping the electric power transmission grid to make greater use of wind power and other renewable energy sources - investments that he said will yield important dividends in the future.
On taxes, the budget proposes a broad effort to shift a greater share of the burden onto rich and affluent Americans, including a proposal to limit home mortgage interest deductions for those with high incomes.
Among those likely to oppose his plans: large agribusiness, drug companies, and oil and gas companies.
"We will each and every one of us have to compromise on certain things we care about but which we simply cannot afford right now. That's a sacrifice we're going to have to make," Obama said as he issued the outline.
