President Obama will present a plan to Congress next month that calls for more than $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction, entitlement reforms and tax increases. Hit the jump to read the rest of the story.
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In a town hall event with supporters in Illinois on Wednesday, the president offered few details of his latest set of proposals, but said everything will be “on the table.” Among the items, deeper savings down the road to pay for a bigger jobs program now.
The president will ask the 12-member congressional super committee to come up with more than the $1.2 trillion floor in debt reduction that it has been tasked to produce in order to eliminate deficit spending.
He said Wednesday that by looking at long-term obligations and costs and figuring out long-term savings, more spending can be had in the short-term to get the economy moving.
“I don’t think it’s good enough for us to just do it part way,” Obama said on the last leg of his Midwestern bus tour before heading back to Washington and a nine-day vacation with the first family on Martha’s Vineyard.
“I will be presenting before this joint committee a very detailed, specific approach to this problem that allows us to grow jobs right now, provide folks who need help the help they need and still gets our deficit and debt under control,” he said.
The proposals to tackle jobs and deficit reduction won’t be unveiled until shortly after Labor Day, leaving Republicans to question the hold-up.
“We really don’t need another speech — just a plan, like, on paper,” Brendan Buck, a spokesman to House Speaker John Boehner tweeted. “Seriously, just drop it in the mail. Podium not required. Thanks.”
Echoing the sentiment, the office of Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell’s, under the heading of “here we go again,” sent around a list of eight other jobs speeches Obama has given.
Nearly 14 million people are unemployed. Many millions more have given up looking for jobs or haven’t found a way to move from part-time to full-time work. The unemployment rate is at 9.1 percent. No president in recent history has been re-elected with a jobless rate nearly that high.
Seeking re-election in a dispiriting economic time for the nation, the president repeatedly has pushed for an extension of the payroll tax cut, the approval of several international trade deals and an extension of jobless benefits. The jobs speech is expected to detail fresh ideas, including additional tax cut proposals.
Obama’s rollout plan allows him to enter September swinging after one of the roughest periods of his presidency and a suddenly hot Republican presidential campaign season.
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday that Obama actually will outline two proposals in September. One will be a jobs plan and the other will be a deficit plan he’ll submit directly to the super committee.
Carney told MSNBC that plan will be “entirely consistent” with the outline Obama and Boehner discussed before congressional leaders scrapped it and agreed to raise the debt ceiling and form a panel to cut the deficit by as much as $2.4 trillion over the next decade.
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