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Obama unveiling campaign-year budget focused on economy as deficit-reduction pressure fades
• WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama is unwrapping a nearly $4 trillion budget that gives Democrats an election-year playbook for fortifying the economy and bolstering Americans' incomes. It also underscores how pressure has faded to launch bold, new attacks on federal deficits.
• Obama's 2015 fiscal blueprint, which he is sending Congress Tuesday, was expected to include proposals to upgrade aging highways and railroads, finance more pre-kindergarten programs and enhance job training. The White House said it would also enlarge the earned income tax credit to cover 13.5 million low-earning workers without children, expand the child care tax credit for some parents and make it easier for workers to contribute to Individual Retirement Accounts.
• A revamping of corporate income taxes and higher tobacco levies would help pay for some of the initiatives.
• White House aides say Obama's blueprint would obey overall agency spending limits enacted in December that followed a pact between Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the heads of the House and Senate budget committees.
• Yet Obama will propose an additional package of $56 billion in spending priorities, the aides say, half for defense and half for domestic programs. It would be fully paid for by cutting spending and narrowing tax loopholes, such as boosting collections from U.S. firms doing business overseas, they said.
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Snowstorm followed by unusually frigid temperatures for March in South, Mid-Atlantic
• WASHINGTON (AP) -- The seemingly endless winter dumped a half a foot snow on the ground in parts of the South, Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, and those areas braced Tuesday morning for something even more unusual in March: a blast of arctic air that was expected to send temperatures plummeting into the single digits.
• Washington has recorded a low temperature in the single digits in March only two times in recorded history -- and the previous two were in 1872 and 1873, according to the National Weather Service. Other parts of the Northeast could also see record lows for the month of March and much of the South will start Tuesday below (Continued on page 33)
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