The Obama Administration has just released its budget for the 2016 fiscal year, which begins on October 1st. I’ll write in a later post about the economics underlying the proposals. In the meantime, based on a reading of the budget documents and a fact sheet posted on the White House Web site, here are some initial takeaways:
1. With the Republicans controlling both chambers of Congress, the budget is as much a political document as an economic one. The chances that it will be enacted in anything like its current form are nil. Instead, the White House is using it to frame the political debate for this year and for the run-up to the 2016 Presidential election—an effort that began with the State of the Union address. The budget fleshes out the populist political agenda that President Obama laid out in that speech.