Obama budget: Deficit and spending issues: the good the bad

President Barack Obama released his budget today, here's my quick take.

Total 2013 budget is $3.8 trillion, a 0.2 percent increase in spending from 2012, but 10 percent higher than spending from Obama's first budget that went from Oct. 2009 to Oct. 2010, according to figures from the Office of Management and Budget.

Includes plan for cutting the deficit by $4 trillion in 10 years. Good. I believe that is near the highest number Republicans have ever proposed as well.

The rub will come in how Obama achieves that reduction. Letting Bush tax cuts expire for those families making over $250,000 a year along with some other tax increases on oil companies and such will bring in about $1.5 trillion, thereby making it about a third of the $4 trillion in deficit reduction.

That will be a contentious issue. Republicans continue to resist. Don't think this will ever pass the House.

Obama cuts Medicare and Medicaid spending, which in my mind does need to be cut, but Obama does it in cuts in payments to providers, doctors and drug companies.

That usually also runs into lots of resistance from both sides of the aisle. It would be a better plan, as Rep. Paul Ryan, Republican House Budget Committee Chair has proposed, to restructure Medicare and Medicaid to control costs overall. He is also working on this plan with Democrat Rep. from Washington state.

Obama doesn't appear to be engaging on this with them.

Some of those plans include giving chunks of money to teams of health care providers, and limiting total funding and basing future funding on patient outcomes.

Obama's plan seems to continue the highly inefficient fee for service plan that really needs to be scrapped and the sooner the better.

Obama's budget proposing a lot of new spending on community college-employer training programs for workers, and additional money to keep teachers and firefighters from being laid off by states.

But I wonder if there aren't already a lot of those college-employer programs and do they really need $8 billion more? Also, structurally, the employment of teachers and firefighters probably needs to be adjusted according to local government funding. In my view, feds should really be too involved in these local-local decisions.