President Obama announced Saturday that the Treasury Department has already begun to implement a plan to reduce the amount of taxes that will be taken from the paychecks of workers. This, according to a recent New York Times article, should increase the take-home pay of the American typical family by at least $65 a month. As a result of tax provisions in the $787 billion economic recovery package the reductions a scheduled to begin on April 1st.
Mr. Obama signed the package into law last week and in his weekly radio address, which he used to promote the stimulus bill and to chart his plans for the economic recovery of our country, he announced that the tax reductions would begin to take affect in April. Moreover, after a week devoted to programs that involve spending the taxpayers money, President Obama said that he was pledging to look for new ways to begin reducing the trillion-dollar deficit that his administration has inherited. He also mentioned in his weekly Radio and Internet address that he would be turning his attention toward restoring discipline to the nation’s budget.
He plans to bring together business and union leaders, as well as financial experts and lawmakers, for a “fiscal summit” at the White House on Monday. The President will then address a joint session of Congress on Tuesday and release his 2010 budget later in the week. Claiming it would put three to five million Americans back to work, President Obama heralded his economic stimulus package as the most extensive economic recovery plan in history. But, Mr. Obama said that the stimulus and housing measures on their own could not push the economy into full recovery.
The President stated, “We can’t produce shared prosperity without firm rules of the road, and we can’t generate sustained growth without getting our deficits under control. In short, we cannot successfully address any of our problems without addressing them all.”
In another statement during the same Radio and Internet address, President Obama said “It will require doing all we can to get exploding deficits under control as our economy begins to recover,” Mr. Obama pledged that he was hard at work on his budget plan for 2010, and that he would submit a budget that was “sober in its assessments, honest in its accounting, and lays out in detail my strategy for investing what we need, cutting what we don’t and restoring fiscal discipline.”
