Obama: Budget Will Reduce the Deficit Without 'Aimless, Reckless' Cuts

President Obama’s budget -- set to be released Wednesday -- will grow the nation’s economy while reducing its deficit without “self-inflicted wounds from Washington” like sequestration, Obama said in his weekly address Saturday.

Obama highlighted the deficit reduction his administration has already enacted and said his budget would create $2 trillion in additional savings through targeted spending cuts and tax reform.

“My budget will reduce our deficits not with aimless, reckless spending cuts that hurt students and seniors and middle-class families,” Obama said, “but through the balanced approach that the American people prefer, and the investments that a growing economy demands.”

While full details have yet to emerge, Obama’s budget will hit federal employees through a less generous formula for calculating retirees’ cost of living adjustments and by asking the workforce to make higher contributions to their retirement pensions.

Obama said his budget proposal is not his “ideal plan,” but it’s a compromise he is “willing to accept in order to move beyond a cycle of short-term, crisis-driven decision-making, and focus on growing our economy and our middle class for the long run.”

In exchange for revenues through tax reform, Obama will offer changes to Medicare and Social Security, such as the new formula to calculate COLAs, known as the chained Consumer Price Index. The alternative calculation would reduce benefits to Social Security recipients in addition to federal retirees.