President Barack Obama on Wednesday unveiled a package of budget cuts and tax increases and called for reviewing "tax expenditures,'' which include the tax-exempt status of credit unions.
In a nationally televised speech, Obama said any reform should build on the calls made by his deficit-reduction commission to reduce "tax expenditures so that there is enough savings to both lower [tax] rates and lower the deficit.''
He didn't mention specific expenditures but did talk about the need to reduce the deficit and spoke of the need to make sacrifices to ensure the nation's long-term prosperity.
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"We will all need to make sacrifices. But we do not have to sacrifice the America we believe in. And as long as I'm president, we won't,'' the president said in a speech at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
Obama said his proposals would cut the deficit by $4 trillion over the next 12 years.
He also took aim at the Republican budget proposals. He said the GOP vision is less about reducing the deficit "than it is about changing the basic social compact in America.''
The president added that there is "nothing courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don't have any clout on Capitol Hill. This is not a vision of the America I know."
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