The New York Times has the full text of President Obama’s speech on reducing the budget. It’s probably the first real speech of the 2012 campaign, and it’s a crucial one—Obama’s trying to paint himself as America’s responsible dad, without sounding like a Jimmy Carter-style killjoy. He called the recently unveiled Republican budget plan “less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America.” Here’s the pivot point:

So here’s the truth. Around two-thirds of our budget is spent on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and national security. Programs like unemployment insurance, student loans, veterans’ benefits, and tax credits for working families take up another 20%. What’s left, after interest on the debt, is just 12 percent for everything else. That’s 12 percent for all of our other national priorities like education and clean energy; medical research and transportation; food safety and keeping our air and water clean.

Up until now, the cuts proposed by a lot of folks in Washington have focused almost exclusively on that 12%. But cuts to that 12% alone won’t solve the problem. So any serious plan to tackle our deficit will require us to put everything on the table, and take on excess spending wherever it exists in the budget. A serious plan doesn’t require us to balance our budget overnight — in fact, economists think that with the economy just starting to grow again, we will need a phased-in approach — but it does require tough decisions and support from leaders in both parties. And above all, it will require us to choose a vision of the America we want to see five and ten and twenty years down the road.

His plan calls for a $4 trillion reduction of the deficit over the next 12 years, raising taxes on the wealthy by allowing the Bush tax cuts to lapse, and…doing something vague to Social Security and Medicare. Find more information about it here and here.

5 replies on “Obama’s Budget Speech”

  1. I like how he slipped in “national security” at the tail-end of his spotlight on Medicare and Social Security.

    National security is the real money. That’s where the vast majority of our budget goes.

    If we want to make legit cuts, we should reduce our tax dollars for no-bid contracts to military industries and contractors like KBR, Halliburton, etc.

  4. Yay! Wikipedia mastah!

    Sorry, El Barferino. “National security” covers a lot more than just the DOD. Anyone regurging that number sets off the red warning light on the rube-o-meter.

    Underneath the vast umbrella known as national security you’ll also find things like Homeland Security. And the VA. Plus about half of DOE what with the nukes and such. Also a big slab of NASA. Then you’ve a chunk of “Other Mandatory Programs,” NSF, Labor, CIA, NSA, State, some DOT, underestimates for our wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, etc, etc.

    Also, the Federal budget misleads by including Social Security which is a trust fund rather than an entity funded by income taxes. This technique of including Social Security began with the Vietnam war to make national security spending seem smaller as a percentage.

    And with all this crazed spending, we incur a lot of debt. See, national security is different than, say, Department of the Interior which makes money for the American people. National security costs us money. (Wait. George W. Bush lied when he told us Iraq would pay for itself?! Sob!)

    Now you’ve got to take into account our interest on this spending. It ain’t just your shopping trips to Walmart and Costco that puts us more under the thumb of China. It’s also all the dough we borrow to pay for national security industries.

    At the end of the day, somewhere between 45% to a little over 50% of our tax dollars go to “national security.” Compared to any other Federal account, this is a “vast majority” indeed.

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