<b><font color='#0000ff'>CONTINUING FISCAL FIGHT</font></b>
The proposals he has offered to U.S. House Speaker John Boehner last year during the widely-scrutinized "fiscal cliff" discussions are still on the table, Obama noted.
The trillion-dollar debt reduction plan mulled over by Obama and Boehner last year went nowhere, partly due to the intransigence of Democrats to slash entitlement spending requested by Republicans, which is also the main driver of U.S. ballooning government deficit.
Obama stressed the nation is making progress on achieving 4 trillion dollars government deficit reduction over the next decade, but part of the deficit reduction should come from tax reforms. Resolving the nation's fiscal challenge through additional tax revenue has remained a flashpoint between Democrats and Republicans.
Top Republican lawmakers including Boehner were resisting a new round of tax hike to solve the government's deficit problem, as Republicans have just agreed an income tax rate hike for households making more than 450,000 dollars a year to resolve the "fiscal cliff" challenge, the first time in two decades that GOP lawmakers gave the green light to an income tax increase.
Experts held that wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush-era tax cuts, economic stimulus measures under the Obama administration to tide over the severe economic recession and surging medical expenses on back of an aging society all contributed in a major way to the spiking U.S. national debt.
In its latest budget outlook, U.S. Congressional Budget Office on Tuesday predicted the federal government to register an 845- billion-dollar budget deficit this year, the first time during Obama's presidency that the red ink would fall below the 1- trillion-dollar threshold, but was still at an alarmingly high level.
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