Barack Obama, Spending Cuts | featured news

President Barack Obama has signed into law a bill to end furloughs of air traffic controllers. The furloughs stemmed from the automatic, across-the-board spending cuts that started taking effect in March. Millions of air travelers were affected recently by delayed flights across the country because of the furloughs.

Wednesday morning, President Barack Obama became the first Democratic president ever to propose cutting Social Security. Democrats spend so much time defending the president, it is easy to forget that even the most beloved presidents make mistakes and missteps. His new budget, which proposes a new method of calculating inflation increases in Social Security payments, is a doozy.

President Barack Obama unveiled his proposed Fiscal Year 2014 budget plan Wednesday in the White House Rose Garden, offering a combination of new spending initiatives and tax increases aimed at creating jobs and reducing future budget deficits. In his remarks, Obama called his plan “a fiscally responsible blueprint for middle-class jobs and growth.”

President Barack Obama’s proposed budget will call for reductions in the growth of Social Security and other benefit programs by including a proposal to lower cost-of-living adjustments to government social safety net spending, a senior administration official says.

President Obama signed a spending bill Tuesday that headed off a government shutdown.

The wrangling of President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans over the federal budget underscores a clash of core philosophies about how the economy works that supersedes any skirmish on taxes or spending cuts.

President Obama will have a bipartisan lunch on Thursday with Representative Paul D. Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, and the panel’s senior Democrat, Representative Chris Van Hollen.

After their fifth budget battle in the past two years and after the sequester cuts went into effect on Friday, both sides seemed to wave the white flag and declare a political truce -- for now. President Obama, during his press conference on Friday, suggested little appetite for a showdown over government operations, which will expire later this month. “If the bill that arrives on my desk is reflective of the commitments that we’ve previously made, then obviously I would sign it because I want to make sure that we keep on doing what we need to do for the American people.”

Speaking after meeting with congressional leaders, President Barack Obama said Friday the budget cuts slated to go into effect today are the "choice" of Republicans who stonewalled any compromise to avert them.

While White House strategists believe that Republicans will be blamed as the cuts’ effects slowly emerge, President Obama risks political damage if Americans end up just shrugging at the reductions.