Obama’s budget proposal splits Nevada senators

By Karoun Demirjian

Monday, Feb. 14, 2011 | 11:28 a.m.

WASHINGTON - Now that both budget proposals are on the table, let the spending battle begin.

President Obama delivered a Valentine’s Day gift to Congress on Monday morning, in the form of his 216-page budget proposal for fiscal year 2012, a year lawmakers on both sides have said must represent a turnaround for Washington if the country is to avoid skyrocketing deficits in the future.

But before anything like that can happen, Congress has to agree on how to dole out the $3.7 trillion the president has asked for -- or where to scale back the package even further.

Republicans are already blasting the president for requesting too much.

“This budget proposal was an opportunity for President Obama to stand behind his pledge to tackle wasteful government spending with the political courage that is needed to make difficult but necessary cuts across the board,” Republican Sen. John Ensign said. “Unfortunately, his rhetoric has not been met with action ... The message from the leader of our country is that jobs can wait but record spending levels cannot.”

Even so, Republicans don’t want to wait until fiscal 2012 to start stripping back spending levels, as was made clear Friday night, when the House Appropriations committee filed a bill to strip about $100 billion from the fiscal 2011 budget. While switching gears like that isn’t normally possible, it is this year, because Congress never actually passed a budget for fiscal 2011 -- only continuing resolutions to fund the government up through March 4.

That deadline doesn’t apply to the budget proposal the president just submitted. But the document set out today will certainly influence the progress of the immediate negotiations, as the president has laid out not only his medium-term objectives and goals, but also his longer-term projections for the fate of the deficit and the national income, as estimated by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.

The president’s staff has also been rounding out what’s on paper by speaking throughout the weekend and on Monday about which programs it intends tackle past fiscal 2012. To the expected chagrin of some Democrats, one of those programs is Social Security.

“It is not anything that will happen this year or next year,” said White House Budget director Jacob Lew. “But it is the right thing for us to do ... in the right way.”

At least for now, Democrats are backing up the president’s proposal.

“The president’s budget offers a long-term plan to responsibly cut the deficit in half in his first term while investing in things that grow our economy, such as education, innovation and infrastructure,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said. “Congressional Republicans are offering a short-sighted, short-term plan to slash the programs that keep us safe and make us competitive while spending billions to provide special breaks to oil and gas companies, the insurance industry, and billionaires ... President Obama’s budget is a serious attempt to make tough choices.”

The president is pledging a freeze in discretionary spending for five years, and to cut the current $14 trillion-plus deficit in half by his second term.

But even in a season of budget crisis, the forthcoming debates won’t be just about where lawmakers choose to cut, but also where they choose to spend.

Obama has been stressing the need for robust investment as well as responsible reductions if the economy is to produce jobs, products and revenue necessary to get the country back up on its feet.

Republicans, too, have identified areas for stimulative spending in their proposal.

For those who want a peek, all the details on the president's budget are here.

And Republicans' FY2011 proposal can be found at the House Appropriations Committee's website.