President Barack Obama’s final budget proposal is a clarion call for Democratic progressivism — a $4.1 trillion spending blueprint that would pour billions into clean energy, education and health care, and pay for it by raising taxes on big banks and the wealthy.

But in an election season in which both parties are being pushed away from their moderate centers, Obama’s proposal, unveiled Tuesday, is sure to inflame Republican opposition. Even before they’d seen the document, the congressional GOP declared the proposal dead and said it had no interest in hearing testimony from the top White House budget official — a sharp break with years of tradition.


And given that the budget entrenches core tenets of liberal ideology, it seems Obama has little hope for any major deals with Republicans in his final year in office.

Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said the blueprint “isn’t even a budget so much as it is a progressive manual for growing the federal government at the expense of hardworking Americans,” adding that “we need to tackle our fiscal problems before they tackle us.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was similarly dismissive. “The president released his budget today. Congress will review his final set of proposals and priorities, his call for new taxes, new spending and more debt,” he said on the Senate floor Tuesday.

In fact, how Obama’s team handles the deficit shows what the parties do have in common — and how far apart they are on solutions.

The president clearly acknowledges the importance of deficit reduction, calling for trimming the deficit by $2.9 trillion over 10 years while keeping budget shortfalls at less than 3 percent of gross domestic product.

But to achieve those targets, the budget includes hundreds of billions in new taxes, including raising the top tax rate on capital gains, slapping a new fee on the biggest financial firms and imposing the “Buffett rule,” which would require wealthy millionaires to pay at least 30 percent of income in taxes. Obama also wants a $10-a-barrel tax on oil, which would raise $319 billion over 10 years.

In the past, unsurprisingly, these ideas have met with virulent opposition from the GOP, and they remain nonstarters in this Congress. And Obama is also counting on savings from an overhaul of the U.S. immigration system, a proposal that’s not going anywhere in the current partisan climate.

Still, Obama’s pitch isn’t all just a prelude to battle. Lawmakers and the administration will have to strike some sort of deal to keep the government running when the current fiscal year ends on Sept. 30 — most likely a continuing resolution to keep the lights on through the election and into early 2017.

And, in a sign that Obama isn’t looking for a knockdown spending fight this year, the president’s proposal abides by the discretionary caps for fiscal 2017 set by last year’s bipartisan budget deal.

“The Budget makes critical investments in our domestic and national security priorities while adhering to the bipartisan budget agreement signed into law last fall, and it lifts sequestration in future years so that we continue to invest in our economic future and our national security,” the White House said in a fact sheet accompanying the budget. “It also drives down deficits and maintains our fiscal progress through smart savings from health care, immigration, and tax reforms.”

At a more granular level, Obama’s blueprint is a grab bag of Democratic priorities. For example, the administration is once again calling for expanding early education. It is asking for more pre-K grants, a child care expansion and a small boost to Head Start. Elsewhere, the budget would increase spending for Obamacare Medicaid expansion by $2.6 billion over a decade in a move designed to be an enticement to the 19 holdout states that have yet to take part.

On the environment, the White House is renewing its call to make permanent wind and solar tax incentives, which Congress decided in December to phase out as part of its omnibus budget deal. The production tax credit, which primarily benefits wind, will be phased out by 2020, and the investment tax credit that goes mostly to solar will fall to zero by 2022 as part of the sweeping tax-and-spending bill enacted last year. But Obama’s budget calls for those incentives to be made permanent and refundable, a long-standing proposal from the administration.

The administration’s budget proposal for fiscal 2017 also seeks to double the nation’s investment in clean energy programs to $12.8 billion in 2021 from $6.4 billion in 2016. “While we have made significant progress in deploying clean energy technologies, accelerating clean energy innovation is essential to addressing climate change,” the proposal says, noting that the U.S. joined with other countries in December in the Paris climate change accord.

Obama also wants to spend $1.3 billion on international climate change assistance through the Global Climate Change Initiative, including $750 million for the Green Climate Fund, the program aimed at helping poor countries cope with the effects of climate change. Obama has pledged $3 billion to the initiative over several years, and he requested $500 million for it in his last budget.

The Pentagon would see significant amounts of cash moved between major programs. The Defense Department’s budget request for the next fiscal year would cut procurement spending by nearly $7 billion from this year to $112 billion. The department’s budget for operations and maintenance would grow by almost the same amount, $6.5 billion, to $251 billion.

So in effect, the Pentagon wants to sacrifice some of its weapons purchases, or modernization, to fund more military operations around the globe — including an increased presence in Eastern Europe to deter Russia and an ongoing air campaign against the Islamic State.

Overall, the Pentagon’s $582.7 billion spending request represents a $2.4 billion increase from this year — an increase that would be used to fund the development of new technologies that Defense Secretary Ash Carter says are crucial to maintaining a military edge over near-peer competitors like China and Russia.

Finally, looking ahead, the White House envisions a fairly rosy economic future. If the policies in the president’s budget were adopted, the administration projects the economy would grow solidly over the next 10 years with the deficit holding steady and debt ticking up slightly.

The White House projects the budget would produce growth in the GDP of 2.6 percent this year and next, with growth holding at about 2.3 percent per year in the early 2020s. Debt held by the public would tick up to 76.5 percent of GDP in fiscal 2017 but fall to 75.3 percent by 2026.

The administration also says the deficit would gradually shrink from 3.3 percent of GDP in fiscal 2016 to 2.6 percent per year over the next decade. That would put the deficit in line with historical averages.

Politico staff contributed to this report.

