A Responsible Budget

EDITORIAL:

President Obama’s 2013 budget was greeted on Monday with Republican catcalls that it is simply a campaign document, but election-year budgets are supposed to explain priorities to voters. This one offers a clear and welcome contrast to the slashing austerity — and protect-the-wealthy priorities — favored by Republican Congressional leaders and the party’s presidential candidates.

The president’s budget calls for long-term deficit reduction, but its immediate priority is to encourage the fledgling economic recovery. Instead of trying to stabilize the budget on the backs of the poor, it would raise taxes on the wealthy and on big banks and eliminate many corporate tax loopholes.

To put Americans back to work, it would invest $350 billion in constructing roads, rail lines and schools, and encourage manufacturing through tax incentives and research spending. It would maintain the Pell grant program for low-income college students and add new spending for teacher improvement and education reform.

Republicans, on the other hand, would cut taxes for the rich and cut almost all of that spending, heedless of the pain that it would inflict on the economy and the millions of Americans still reeling from the downturn’s effects. In poll after poll, the public has made clear that it prefers the president’s approach of rebuilding the economy now and tackling the deficit when the fundamentals are stronger. While Republicans have counted on voters blaming Mr. Obama for the hard times, some are beginning to worry that they will be blamed for their obstructionism. That was clear on Monday when House leaders announced that they would agree to Mr. Obama’s proposal to extend the payroll tax cut for the rest of this year without insisting on drastic cuts elsewhere to pay for it.

Although the House Budget Committee chairman, Paul Ryan, said the budget proposal would leave the country “drowning in debt,” there are still plenty of painful cuts included. Much of that is because of the debt-ceiling agreement that Republicans engineered last year, which forced $8.5 billion in discretionary savings in next year’s budget alone. That means substantial cuts to the Justice Department, Housing and Urban Development, and the Environmental Protection Agency. Clean-water programs would lose out, as would low-income heating assistance, community development block grants and space exploration programs. The White House could have found more savings in the Defense Department, which declines by $5 billion, or just 1 percent.

Unlike Republicans, Mr. Obama would trim only slightly from growth in Medicare and Medicaid. His proposed $8 billion investment in community colleges is sound. Still, it suggests that a lack of skills is at the heart of the jobs crisis. The big problems right now are a lack of jobs and a lack of demand.

If Congress were not dysfunctional — if it cared more about economic stabilization than scoring political points — it would sign on to a budget like this. As it is, the proposal will go nowhere, largely because of the Republican refusal to raise taxes on the wealthy and to spend money on vital programs. Senate Democrats, who don’t want to make hard political choices, also share the blame. They have already said that they do not intend to pass the president’s or their own budget, deferring their responsibility for a third year. At a time when honest economic planning needs all the support it can get, that’s a serious mistake.