Barack Obama, Deficit | featured news

Voters have long favored President Obama over Mitt Romney for handling terrorism and advancing the interests of the middle class. Romney, however, has consistently enjoyed a wide advantage on only one issue: the nation’s gaping budget deficit.

President Obama’s landmark health-care initiative, long touted as a means to control costs, will actually add more than $340 billion to the nation’s budget woes over the next decade, according to a new study by a member of the board that oversees Medicare financing.

President Barack Obama will release a plan on Monday calling for more than $3 trillion in deficit cuts over 10 years, with about half of the savings coming from higher taxes on the wealthy and big corporations.

President Barack Obama is sending Congress a $3.73 trillion spending blueprint that pledges $1.1 trillion in deficit savings over the next decade through spending cuts and tax increases.

President Barack Obama will announce a two-year pay freeze for federal employees Monday, a move White House officials say is the first of many difficult decisions that must be made to reduce the nation's mounting deficit.

Determined to have a deficit commission with or without Congress' backing, President Barack Obama plans to announce on Thursday that he is establishing a panel similar to – although weaker than – the one lawmakers rejected.

President Barack Obama renewed his pledge on Saturday to make job creation his top priority in 2010 but said it was also critical to rein in a record budget deficit that threatened economic recovery.

The Obama administration next week will project a federal budget deficit for fiscal 2009 of about $1.58 trillion, slightly less than previously predicted, a senior administration official said.

Many Americans applauded the spending plans and tax breaks set out in President Barack Obama's record budget, while others questioned the yawning deficit it would entail.

President Obama is reaching across party lines Monday to host a bipartisan "fiscal responsibility summit" as the government tackles the seemingly contradictory tasks of controlling a soaring federal deficit while spending the country's way out of a deep recession.