In other measures, Obama’s budget would raise the tax on a pack of cigarettes from $1.01 to $1.95 per pack to finance early childhood education schemes.

It would also provide $1.65 billion for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and $4 billion to allow security upgrades following the attack on the US consulate in the Libyan city of Benghazi last September.

The Pentagon said the budget would hold military spending steady but would not account for the cost of the war in Afghanistan — which is expected to surpass $80 billion in the current year.

The plan would also boost funding for major science, health and research programs and find room to sustain Obama’s challenge to NASA to send humans to an asteroid in 2025 and to Mars in 2030.

Among fiscal measures opposed by Republicans, the Obama budget would implement the “Buffett Rule,” which would mandate that households making more than $1 million a year pay at least 30 percent of income in taxes.

Since the Summer of 2011, soon after Republicans held the debt ceiling hostage, Obama took a new strategy when it came to dealing with them. He puts the decision on them. He makes them look radical and out of touch. He makes them look unreasonable.

He did it with his jobs bill in 2011. He took the rhetoric Republicans were pushing about jobs needing to be a focus, presented his American Jobs Act, and let Republicans sink when they refused to pass it. He did it with the extension of the payroll tax in December 2011. He did it more recently with the “fiscal cliff” (where he also had offered a chained CPI in his first proposal). Now he’s doing it again.

His first proposal is meant to stir anger in liberals. Get them going. Get them outraged. You know why? Because that’s a great tool for him to say, “See, I proposed something that angered even my own base—and still Republicans were too busy playing politics to accept my deal.”

He knows Republicans won’t accept this deal. Hell, why would they? It calls for tax increases for the wealthy and spending for programs that help the poor—two things Republicans have overwhelmingly opposed in the past few years. But what are they supposed to do? For years they’ve slammed President Obama for not proposing a budget (which is a lie)—now he’s proposed one that can’t be mistaken for anything radically left-wing, because it’s actually angered liberals.

Now they’re stuck. Obama proposed a budget, and it’s pissed off liberals.
But they’ll never support it, because he’s the one who proposed it—Obama knows this.

Chained CPI is shorthand for “Chained Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers.” In short, it’s a way to index spending and taxes — including Social Security benefits — to the rate of inflation, or the rise in prices over time. But it’s not the only way.

What’s important in the context of the debate over Obama’s budget is that chained CPI would mean Social Security benefits would increase at a slower rate than they do using the current index.

As our friends over at Wonkblog pointed out last year, Social Security benefits are currently calculated using CPI-W, or the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers. (Yes, that’s a mouthful.) Over time, benefit levels tick up based on CPI-W, to keep up with the fact that a dollar twenty years ago is not worth what it is today.

Here’s the bottom line: Using chained CPI instead of CPI-W means the rate at which those benefits tick up would be slower, because the former reflects substitutions consumers would make in response to rising prices of certain items.Therein lies the “chained” part of the name. The metric utilizes a basket of goods and services that are measured changes from month to month; much like a daisy chain. If the cost of a certain form of transportation goes up, for example, people might switch to another kind. This kind of “substitution” is part of what is factored into chained CPI.