NPR新闻:奥巴马周一公布2013财政年度预算案(1/3)

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President Obama will unveil his budget for the next fiscal year on Monday. To find out more about the budget proposal, Steve Inskeep talks to David Wessel, economics editor at The Wall Street Journal.

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An annual ritual comes on Monday. President Obama unveils his budget for the next fiscal year. Of course, it's an election year, so this is a political document as much as a fiscal document, which, to some degree, it always is.
David Wessel, economics editor at The Wall Street Journal and a regular guest on our program is here to talk about this.
So how much does this really matter, given that President Obama and Congress have had difficulty agreeing on anything in the last year or more?
Well, actually, it matters less than usual this year. Some of the big budget decisions for the coming year have already been made. And the president has already previewed a lot of the proposals he's going to make in the Monday budget when he offered the so-called supercommittee of Congress, the deficit reduction panel, a whole set of ideas for reducing the deficit. So it's unlikely that any of his big ideas, tax increases or benefit cuts, will really be adopted this year.
So why not call off this budget process?
Well, for one thing, every president since Warren Harding has been required by law to submit a budget. It is the one place where a president has to make all his promises add up, and there's some value in forcing a president to do that. But I think more important, beneath the big, mind-numbing totals, there is a lot of detail that will influence what Congress will actually do this year.