Washington ? President Barack Obama’s proposed budget predicts the national deficit will crest at a record-breaking almost $1.6 trillion in the current fiscal year, then start to recede in 2011 to just below $1.3 trillion.

Still, the administration’s new budget to be released today says deficits over the next decade will average 4.5 percent of the size of the economy, a level that economists say is dangerously high if not addressed.

A congressional official provided the information, which comes from a White House summary document circulating freely on Capitol Hill and among Washington’s lobbyists. The official spoke Sunday on condition of anonymity because the spending proposal is not supposed to be made public until today.

Details of the administration’s budget headed for Congress include an additional $100 billion to attack painfully high unemployment. The proposed $3.8 trillion budget would provide billions more to pull the country out of the Great Recession while increasing taxes on the wealthy and imposing a spending freeze on many government programs.

Administration projections show the deficit never dropping below $700 billion, even under assumptions that war costs will drop precipitously to just $50 billion in some years instead of more than three times that this year and next.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said the administration believed “somewhere in the $100 billion range” would be the appropriate amount for a new jobs measure made up of a business tax credit to encourage hiring, increased infrastructure spending and money from the government’s bailout fund to get banks to increase loans to struggling small businesses.

That price tag would be below a $174 billion bill passed by the House in December but far higher than a measure that could come to the Senate floor this week.

Gibbs said it was important for Democrats and Republicans to put aside their differences to pass a bill that addresses jobs, the country’s No. 1 concern. “I think that would be a powerful signal to send to the American people,” Gibbs said in an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Job creation was a key theme of the budget President Barack Obama was sending Congress today, a document designed, as was the president’s State of the Union address, to reframe his young presidency after a protracted battle over health care damaged his standing in public opinion polls and contributed to a series of Democratic election defeats.