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President Obama this week announced his budget proposal for the 2013 fiscal year, a plan that includes undoing the Bush-era tax cuts for individuals making over $250,000 a year and increasing capital gains taxes from 15% to 35%. Republicans and conservative pundits predictably rejected the President’s plan outright. A number of companies like AT&T and UPS, have banded together to lobby Congress to maintain the current tax rate for capital gains and dividends. Addressing a live audience in Virginia on Tuesday, Obama also reiterated his support for the Buffett Rule – a tax on millionaires, invoking an often-repeated fact: that billionaire Warren Buffett’s secretary pays a higher tax rate than he does. Overall, the budget projects increased revenues of $1.3 trillion.

Despite the rain of right wing criticism, Obama has also consistently picked up a standard conservative talking point, and this week was no exception – he asserted the importance of reducing the federal deficit by making what he called “difficult cuts,” and “tough choices.”

Media coverage of the budget proposal has skewed severely toward conservative values. A typical example is the Washington Post – generally thought of as a liberal newspaper. In the Post’s February 14th analysis of Obama’s budget, the report’s authors interviewed almost exclusively pro-business voices from such institutions as the US Chamber of Commerce, major corporations like Deloitte and KPMG, as well as Republican officials like former Louisiana Republican Congressman Jim McCreary, and current Michigan Republican Congressman Dave Camp.

GUEST: Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy: And Everything else the Right Doesn’t Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America

Read Holland’s work online here: www.alternet.org/authors/6645/