President Obama's new budget plan for Fiscal Year 2013 is somewhat like a rehash of recent budgets from this administration, as it doesn't bring the nation close to a balanced budget and repeats a number of new tax plans on high income earners that have gone nowhere in the Congress.
As for individual departments, here's some examples of what's in the Obama budget:
* Agriculture - budget cuts almost 3% or $700 million
* Commerce - $8 billion budget is increase of 5%
* Defense - military budget goes down 1%, $5.1 billion
* Education - almost $70 billion, up 2.5%
* Energy - $27.2 billion budget is up 3.2%
* HHS - Health & Human Services up 0.3% to $76.4 billion
* Interior - $11.4 billion budget up about 1%
* Justice - $27.1 billion, down 0.4%
* Labor - $12 billion is slightly down from 2012
* State Department - $51.6 billion up 1.6%
* Transportation - $74 billion is up 2%
* Treasury - up 6.9% to $14 billion; mainly IRS money
* Veterans - $64 billion is up 4.5%
* NASA - $17.7 billion is down $59 million
* Army Corps of Engineers - down 5.4% to $4.7 billion
* EPA - $8.3 billion, a decrease of 1.2%
Obviously there is a lot more in this budget, which is the size of four phone book type documents.
As for tax increases on the wealthy, here is the list of "Upper-income tax provisions" included in the budget:
* Sunset the Bush tax cuts for those with income in excess of $250,000 ($200,000 if single)
* Reinstate the limitation on itemized deductions for upper-income taxpayers
* Reinstate the personal exemption phaseout for upper-income taxpayers
* Reinstate the 36-percent and 39.6-percent rates for upper-income taxpayers
* Tax qualified dividends as ordinary income for upper-income taxpayers
* Tax net long-term capital gains at a 20-percent rate for upper-income taxpayers
As for tax cuts, here is the list of items for "families and individuals" in the Obama budget:
* Extend the American Opportunity Tax Credit
* Provide for automatic enrollment in IRAs, including a small employer tax credit, and doubling of the tax credit for small employer plan start-up costs
* Expand EITC for larger families
* Expand child and dependent care tax credit
* Extend exclusion from income for cancellation of certain home mortgage debt
As for the deficit, this budget predicts higher deficits this year than expected, and then lower in the years ahead - but nothing close to a balanced budget.
* 2012 deficit estimate - $1.33 trillion
* 2013 deficit estimate - $901 billion
* 2014 deficit estimate - $668 billion
* 2015 deficit estimate - $609 billion
* 2016 deficit estimate - $648 billion
* 2017 deficit estimate - $612 billion
