Obama Readies $3.8T Budget With Record $1.6T Deficit

President Obama's proposed budget predicts the national deficit will crest at a record-breaking $1.6 trillion in the current fiscal year, then start to recede in 2011 to $1.3 trillion, a congressional official said today. The new budget, out tomorrow, says deficits over the next decade will average 4.5% of the size of the economy, a level economists say is dangerously high if not addressed, said the official, who was not authorized to discuss the budget before its public release.

The proposed $3.8 trillion budget would provide billions more to pull the country out of the Great Recession while increasing taxes on the wealthy and imposing a spending freeze on many government programs. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said the administration considered "somewhere in the $100 billion range" the appropriate amount for a new jobs measure. That price tag would undercut a $174 billion bill passed by the House in December but top an $83 billion proposal that surfaced last week in the Senate.
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