President Obama’s 2017 budget

Though Republicans like to think of themselves as the party that cuts waste, fraud, and abuse, Democrats, too, propose putting the ax to programs that they’d like to see go away.

Barack Obama’s fiscal year 2017 budget proposal is no exception. Though it generally offers higher levels of government spending than Republicans favor, that doesn’t mean Obama loves every program the government runs. In fact, he’s proposing to entirely eliminate dozens of initiatives — often small grant programs — that his team has identified as superfluous or unnecessary.

It’s the last year of President Obama’s presidency. He doesn’t have to stand for reelection. Congress isn’t going to pass any of his proposals anyway. So he may as well dream big.

That’s one way to read this proposal in Obama’s final budget: He’s suggesting that Congress slap a $10.25-per-barrel tax on oil, phased in over five years, in order to fund $319 billion worth of investments in “clean transportation” over the next decade. That would mean massively increased spending on mass transit, high-speed rail, self-driving cars, freight upgrades, and so on.

This Tuesday, the Obama administration will unveil its eighth and final budget proposal, its last comprehensive, detailed vision of how the federal government should look.

The budget is a key indication of the administration’s values and priorities. It’s an expression of the mainstream of Democratic Party policy thinking on a wide range of topics, from pre-K to housing to unemployment. Even though it has virtually no chance of changing actual government policy, that role is important in and of itself.

In 2014, America’s opioid painkiller and heroin epidemic led to nearly 29,000 opioid overdoses, causing nearly two-thirds of the record 47,000 drug overdoses that year. While there are already some measures in place to squash this rising epidemic, the Obama administration on Tuesday proposed a $1.1 billion plan to boost the fight.

The proposal would fund several programs over two years, with a focus on increasing access to opioid abuse treatment options, particularly in states like West Virginia and New Hampshire that have been hardest hit by the epidemic: