Blue Dogs want Obama to nip deficit

Top Democrats looking for more details on how the Obama
administration will shrink the growing deficit will get the chance to press the
president’s top budget aides on Tuesday.

In his budget, President Obama has proposed cutting the
projected 2009 deficit of $1.75 trillion by more than two-thirds, to $533
billion, by the end of his first term. But much of the proposed savings will
come from one-time measures — the end of the Iraq war and the repeal of President
Bush’s income tax cuts for the wealthy. The budget begins to grow again in
2014, according to the White House’s projections, though it remains at
approximately 3 percent of GDP during that year and beyond.

{mosads}Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) and other centrist Democrats
have said they want more focus on reducing the budget in future years.

Conrad said Thursday, after Obama’s budget plan was
unveiled, that reducing the deficit to 3 percent of GDP over the next five
years would be “a good accomplishment.”

“But I would like to see then further progress made
in the second five years,” he added. “That is going to take
fundamental changes in the larger fiscal picture.”

Conrad, centrist Democrats such as Rep. Jim Cooper
(Tenn.), and Sen. Judd Gregg (N.H.), the top Republican on the Senate
Budget Committee, have called for a bipartisan task force that would come up
with a plan to reduce the deficit and restore the country’s fiscal health.

White House budget director Peter Orszag and Treasury
Secretary Timothy Geithner will testify about the budget before congressional
committees this week.

Orszag will appear before the House Budget Committee on
Tuesday and Conrad’s Senate Budget Committee on Wednesday. Geithner testifies
before the House Ways and Means Committee on Tuesday, the Senate Finance
Committee on Wednesday and the House Budget Committee on Thursday.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke will also weigh in
on the budget on Tuesday during an appearance before the Senate Budget
Committee.

Conrad and Rep. John Spratt (D-S.C.), the chairman of the
House Budget Committee, have praised most of the president’s budget plan,
calling it a more “honest” accounting of the nation’s expenses than
President Bush’s budget proposals. They’ve also lauded Obama for emphasizing
reforms of the healthcare system, which is driving up government expenses.

But Spratt, a centrist Blue Dog, suggested that more
needs to be done in the future to keep the national debt — expected to double
to nearly $18 trillion by 2010 — in check. Spratt has said he also supports
some sort of special legislative process to propose new fiscal reforms.

“Many in Congress, myself included, will be
pleased to see the deficit decline to $533 billion in 2013, but we’d also like
to see it keep declining further thereafter,” Spratt said last week during
a news conference with Conrad. “So this is not by any means the end of the
process.”