WASHINGTON – A quick quiz:

Monday is –

a) Groundhog Day

b) Budget Day

c) A day for repeating the same old arguments over spending and taxes, only louder.

d) All of the above.

If you picked “d,” you’re in the proper spirit for federal Budget Day, which appropriately falls on Groundhog Day this year. It’s safe to predict we’re in for way more than six more weeks of Democrats and Republicans fighting over how to spend our money.

Here are five things to know before President Barack Obama’s 2016 budget fully emerges Monday:

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Despite all the hoopla surrounding it, a president’s budget merely is a suggestion. That’s especially true this year, with Obama delivering his multi-trillion-dollar wish list to a House and Senate run by the opposition.

The Constitution gives Congress power to decide how to spend taxpayers’ money. After lawmakers get the president’s budget, they’ll set about coming up with their own, very different, spending plan. There’s a hitch, though – their legislation needs Obama’s signature to become law.

If Congress and the president can’t compromise on spending, that’s how we end up with a partial government shutdown. Republican leaders and Obama say they don’t want that to happen this year.

Still, the usual big disputes loom: Obama wants more spending and higher taxes on the wealthy. Most Republicans want to spend less – except on the military – and resist tax increases.

Plus, this year Republicans are promising to use spending bills to attack Obama’s signature health care law and to roll back his order giving some immigrants relief from deportation.

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The president will call for increasing spending on agency operating budgets by 7 percent next year, blowing through limits set in an earlier bipartisan deal.

Previewing the detailed document to be released Monday, the White House said it would call for spending about $74 billion more next year than the painful automatic cuts Obama signed into law in that 2011 deal commonly known as the “sequester.” Those harsh automatic cuts originally were set in motion as a threat that would force bipartisan agreement to replace them with something more sensible, but it didn’t work.

Obama roughly would divide the extra money he seeks between the military and domestic programs, such as child care, college aid and medical research.

The White House, without giving details yet, said Obama would offset his spending increases by cutting inefficient programs and closing tax loopholes. In that way, he could continue the recent trend of shrinking the nation’s annual budget deficits.

Republicans say that’s no good. They prefer to tackle the deficit by holding domestic spending in check, or trimming even more.

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The military brass has been pleading for relief from their automatic spending limits. Many lawmakers in both parties, eyeing terror attacks and trouble spots around the globe, are anxious to help.

Obama’s proposal to raise the defense budget by $38 billon would allow for more fighter jets and ships. By bundling the military increase with more domestic spending, Obama will pressure Republicans eager to boost the military budget to give in to some of his priorities.

Will Republicans insist on holding the line on spending, even if it means the Pentagon has to go without, too? And how far are Democratic lawmakers and Obama willing to go in using national defense as a bargaining chip?

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If Congress is sure to reject and redo Obama’s budget proposal, you might wonder: Why does he bother?

For one thing, the law says he has to submit a budget to Congress by the first Monday in February, although Obama has sometimes missed that deadline.

Plus, the federal budget is a big deal. It’s expected to be in the vicinity of $4 trillion – that’s trillion with a “t” – for the fiscal year beginning in October.

It goes much deeper than political rhetoric about ending big government or boosting the middle class.

The budget carries thousands and thousands of decisions about concrete things the government does – such as paying park rangers, Border Patrol agents and workers who answer IRS help lines; spending money for air traffic control, food inspection and medical research; weeding out ineffective programs and launching new ones that, hopefully, work better.

The exercise has gone awry over the last few years, leading to showdowns and a 2013 shutdown and failure to complete the normal budget process in a gridlocked Congress.

But the budget minutia that federal agencies sweat over and congressional committees are charged with overseeing is what keeps the U.S. government running.

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Running federal agencies isn’t even the half of it.

The biggest share of the budget goes to what’s called “mandatory spending” – ongoing payments that don’t need annual approval by Congress. Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security are the biggies. Others include unemployment checks, food stamps and pensions for government retirees and veterans.

To take on the nation’s long-term debt problem, lawmakers and the president would have to deal with these growing costs.

So far, attempts to reach this sort of “grand bargain” have failed – repeatedly.

Associated Press writers Josh Lederman and Andrew Taylor contributed to this report.