Obama released his budget today, and in it he attempts to reduce the Federal Deficit by $1.7 trillion over 10 years, using a combination of spending cuts and increased taxes.

So what does the budget really look like?

We compared the numbers from the White House budget with the current CBO baseline of what budgets are currently expected to look like to figure out what he actually changes

For each key category, the level zero is the current projected funding level for the next ten years.

If a line goes above zero, the President's budget will spend more on it than current funding levels — or in the case of revenues, that number will be higher. 

Just a primer:

  • Revenues are money that flows into the government through taxes.
  • Mandatory spending is programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and income security programs
  • Defense discretionary is made up of funds given by congress to the defense department as well as several other departments with defense programs
  • Non-defense discretionary funds go to all other executive functions besides defense action. 

The general trend? Most of the lines on the budget exceed funding for the next two to three years (stimulus basically), then drop below projected funding levels following 2016 or 2017. So in other words, this represents the kind of stimulus-now, but-later budgeting that a lot of economists in Washington favor:

obama budgetWalter Hickey / BI