WASHINGTON — Breathtaking in its scope and ambition, President Barack Obama’s agenda for the economy, health care and energy now goes to a Congress unaccustomed to resolving knotty issues and buffeted by powerful interests that oppose parts of his plan.
Perhaps the only things as high as Obama’s goals are the hurdles they must clear.
While tackling the economic crisis, he is asking Congress to enact contentious measures that have been debated, but not decided, in calmer times: combat global warming with a pollution tax on industries; cut subsidies for big farms; raise taxes on the wealthy; make big changes to health care, including lower reimbursements for Medicare and Medicaid treatments and prescription drugs.
Standing alone, any one of these proposals would trigger a brawl in Congress and fierce debates outside Washington. Obama wants the proposals done largely in concert, as an interrelated plan to undo major elements of Ronald Reagan’s conservative movement.
Obama outlined the approach in a budget proposal Thursday, a sprawling road map that will require several hard-fought pieces of legislation.
“We’re struck with how bold and courageous a budget it is,” said James Horney of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which supports the president. “There are a whole lot of things that are going to be extremely difficult because there are very powerful vested interests out there that will fight them.”
The president acknowledged that in his weekly radio address Saturday. “I realize that passing this budget won’t be easy,” he said. It “represents a threat to the status quo in Washington.”
Obama is not simply proposing a budget that assumes a jaw-dropping deficit of $1.75 trillion this year, a quadruple increase from the year before. He’s trying to redirect strong currents in American society.
The wealthiest 5 percent would pay a whopping $1 trillion in higher taxes over the next decade, while most others would get tax cuts. Industries would buy and trade permits to emit heat-trapping gases. Higher-income older people would pay more for Medicare benefits. Drug companies would receive smaller profits from the government. Banks would play a much smaller role in student loans.
Obama’s climb is steep. Even with solid Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, he secured a $787 billion stimulus package only after accepting compromises that irked liberals but won the support of three Republican senators.
Not a single House Republican backed it. Judging from House GOP leaders’ immediate condemnation of his budget blueprint, Obama can expect more of the same.
More troubling for him, however, are the divisions quickly emerging among Democratic, liberal and centrist constituencies that either backed the stimulus or stayed on the sidelines.
Democratic Rep. Collin Peterson of Minnesota, the House Agriculture Committee chairman, criticized Obama’s plan to cut direct payments to farms with sales exceeding $500,000 a year. “Now is not the time” to reopen a recently passed farm bill, he said.
Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, one of the stimulus bill’s three Republican backers, said it is hard to see how Obama can meet his new deficit-reduction targets. He called Obama’s chief energy proposal “entirely speculative” and urged the president “to forgo the tax increases” in the plan.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which also backed the stimulus bill, said Obama’s budget blueprint “appears to move in exactly the wrong direction. More taxes, heavy-handed regulations, and command-and-control government will not hasten recovery… You don’t build a house by blowing up its foundation.”
The president’s agenda is vast and ambitious, said Bruce Reed, who oversaw domestic policy in Bill Clinton’s White House, but the times call for it. After all, he said, “Obama didn’t have the luxury of saying, ‘I’ll handle the economic crisis and then get back to you on the rest of America’s future.’ “
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