Budget Fact Check: Responsible Spending to Grow America's Economy
03/19/2009
RESPONSIBLE SPENDING TO GROW AMERICA’S ECONOMY
Partisan attacks claim that President Obama's budget spends too much…
In fact, the President’s budget cuts non-defense discretionary spending over 10 years – to its lowest level as a percent of the economy in nearly half a century.
The President's budget:
Includes $2 trillion worth of budget savings through:
- Ending the war in Iraq
- Cutting programs that are not effective
- Ending tax breaks for corporations that ship jobs overseas
- Asking those who make $250,000 per year and have had huge tax cuts over the past eight years to pay a little more
Includes key integrity initiatives to protect taxpayer money by rooting out any waste, fraud, and abuse, saving nearly $50 billion over 10 years. Among other things, this will:
- Reform federal contracting and defense purchasing;
- Reduce improper payments and strengthen efficiency in Social Security, Medicare and Unemployment Insurance programs; and
- Step up IRS enforcement to collect unpaid taxes from those who are not paying what they owe.
The President's budget also contains critical investments that will grow the economy:
- Makes critical investments in the modernization our nation’s infrastructure.
- Helps small businesses and innovative companies grow by eliminating the capital gains tax on small businesses and making the Research and Experimentation Tax Credit permanent.
- Puts money in the pockets of America’s workers and their families:
- Makes permanent the $800 “Making Work Pay” tax cut for 95 percent of working families.
- Gives 60 million seniors and people with disabilities an extra $250 by temporarily increasing Social Security and Veterans benefits.
- Expands and extends unemployment insurance benefits for jobless Americans seeking work in this troubled economy.
- Expands the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit to help millions of families with children.
- Permanently protects millions of middle-class families from being hit by the alternative minimum tax.
- Funds weatherization for low-income family homes to save working families an average of $350 per year.
- Improves opportunities for future generations:
- Makes the $2,500 American Opportunity Tax Credit permanent to make college more affordable.
- Triples the number of graduate fellowships in the sciences to help foster innovation here at home.
- Expands Pell Grants to account for inflation.
- Modernizes the electric grid for the integration and use of greater amounts of renewable energy and increased utilization of innovative efficiency technologies.
The Obama Budget:
- Cuts taxes (for 95 percent of American workers)
- Cuts spending (non-defense discretionary - over 10 years - to its lowest level as a percent of the economy in nearly half a century)
- Grows nothing but jobs
- Cuts the deficit (in half over four years)
- Ends an era of irresponsibility and gimmicks
Creating American Jobs means:
- Making quality health care affordable
- Powering our economy with clean American energy
- Modernizing our education system
We can't afford to wait. Failure to reform and invest produced eight years of the slowest job growth in three quarters of a century.