Budget proposal is Obama’s map back to big government [View all]

[babylonsister]

Budget proposal is Obama’s map back to big government
By David Lightman
McClatchy Washington Bureau
February 2, 2015 Updated 56 minutes ago



WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama wants the era of big government back.

Ronald Reagan in his 1981 inaugural ushered in an era of skepticism about Uncle Sam by declaring that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Bill Clinton affirmed the sentiment in his 1996 State of the Union address, proclaiming, “the era of big government is over.”

Now Obama, unleashed from elections, entering the final two years of his presidency and wrestling with a legacy that includes a struggling middle class, is using his proposed budget for 2016 as a political manifesto. It’s one he hopes will turn the country’s course back toward the embrace of government that ruled from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s through Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society of the 1960s.

The budget he proposed Monday, with big boosts in spending and debt, suggests a crusade for a strong central government as a provider for the disadvantaged and bulwark against corporate excess, financed by new taxes on the wealthy.

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