President Obama will unveil his budget for the next fiscal year on Monday. To find out more about the budget proposal, Steve Inskeep talks to David Wessel, economics editor at The Wall Street Journal.

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The budget, for instance, will show us precisely how the Pentagon plans to live within its new slimmed down diet that Congress has prescribed. It'll show us where the president wants to cut spending in order to live within these new caps that Congress has set and where he wants to increase it. So it will influence a lot of the small decisions that really matter to companies and people, even if the big picture numbers are already set. Well, you mentioned that the president did make some proposals in his State of the Union speech the other day. Is Congress likely to take any of them up? Well, Congress is unlikely to take up the big one, which is to raise taxes on people who make more than a quarter of a million dollars a year, as the president proposes. But it could very well take some of the spending cuts that he has endorsed and use them for other things, for instance, to offset the cost of extending the payroll tax holiday, which is going to expire at the end of February unless Congress does something. It gives the Republicans a bit of political cover to embrace a spending cut that the president has already approved. So that battle will be going on in Capitol Hill. How much will the financial markets pay attention to what Congress and the president do? There's always individual companies that are interested in one part of the budget or another, what'll happen to their defense contract, what'll happen to this set of housing loan guarantees or something.