At Los Angeles Times, "Obama's budget plan draws upon his previous proposals":
President Obama will call for new spending on infrastructure, education and manufacturing research, as well as higher taxes on top earners, in a budget proposal aimed at underlining his top economic priorities as he gears up his reelection campaign.
Senior administration officials Friday offered a preview of the president's 2013 budget proposal, which is due to be formally unveiled Monday.
The blueprint outlined pulls heavily from proposals previously put forward by the president — including his jobs bill, most of which is stalled in Congress, and his deficit reduction plan, which fizzled in the failed congressional "super committee" charged with reducing the deficit.
Officials said the budget would abide by spending caps set by Congress in the August budget deal, keeping discretionary spending levels essentially flat in fiscal 2013.
Over the decade, discretionary spending would drop from 8.7% of gross domestic product to 5%, officials said.
To achieve that, the August agreement mandates steep and unpopular cuts in defense and domestic spending, a result of the super committee's failure to forge a broader deficit reduction plan. The president's budget seeks to head off those cuts by offering up a new version of the deficit reduction package he introduced in September.
The plan claims more than $4 trillion in deficit reduction. It would accomplish this through the expiration of President George W. Bush-era tax cuts on upper-income Americans, closing tax loopholes, winding down the military spending in Iraq and Afghanistan and cutting costs in Medicare and Medicaid.
The plan will reiterate a call for tax reform to be guided by the so-called Buffett rule, the principle advocated by billionaire Warren Buffett that no household making more than $1 million a year should pay less than a 30% tax rate. But officials said the budget would not estimate how much revenue such a rule would generate.
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