WASHINGTON — President Obama has lately begun pointing to optimistic signs for the economy, but the continuing crisis still bedevils his budget projections and his domestic agenda.
The administration, in final budget and tax details released Monday, disclosed a double wallop of bad news from government number-crunchers. First, its Office of Management and Budget reported that the economy had added — both for this year and next — $90 billion to the historically high deficit estimates the administration issued just two months ago.
And the Treasury released revised figures showing that Mr. Obama’s proposal for financing fully half of his health care initiative over the next decade — a 28 percent limit on deductions for Americans in the top two income tax brackets — would raise $267 billion, or roughly $50 billion less than he initially projected. That further complicates the president’s struggles, together with Democrats in Congress, to pay for overhauling health care.
To fill the revenue gap, the Treasury outlined several new ideas for raising nearly $60 billion over 10 years, mainly from tightening rules for inheritance taxes but also from changes in taxing some types of life insurance and other products.
