PDA

View Full Version : Senate Democrats release first budget in four years, includes $1 trillion in tax increases



Teh One Who Knocks
03-14-2013, 03:50 PM
FOX News


http://i.imgur.com/VJu6aXW.jpg

The Senate on Wednesday presented its first budget in four years, a proposal by leaders of the Democrat-controlled chamber that calls for nearly $1 trillion in tax increases but includes no strategy to make federal revenue match spending in the coming years.

The plan calls for $975 billion in new tax revenue through closing loopholes and ending deductions and credits benefiting corporations and the country’s highest wage earners.

It also calls for $100 billion in new stimulus spending while cutting $1.85 trillion from the deficit over 10 years. The rest of the savings would come through spending cuts.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Patty Murray said the budget takes a balanced, “pro-middle-class” approach and argued the country’s economic problems started long before fellow Democrats entered the White House in 2009.

“Despite some of the rhetoric you may hear from my Republican colleagues, the Great Recession didn’t start the day President Obama was elected,” said Murray, D-Wash.

The plan also calls for replacing the recent, $85 billion in spending cuts with more measured cuts.

Committee members will begin voting and submitting amendments Thursday, with a full Senate vote expected by next week.

Alabama Sen. Jeff Session, the committee’s ranking Republican, immediately criticized the proposal.

“It’s anything but balanced,” he said. “Raising taxes and spending is anything but balanced.”

The budget was presented one day after the Republican-controlled House rolled out its fiscal 2014 budget -- a plan to balance the budget in 10 years largely by slowing the rate of spending and adding in the roughly $600 billion in tax increases Democrats got in January.

The upper chamber announced the details as President Obama met with House Republicans.

Obama said after the meeting that it was "good” and “useful."

However, the recent optimism about Democrats and Republicans perhaps agreeing on a mix of tax increases and spending cuts to craft a single budget – or a so-called “grand bargain” – appears to be fading.

"Ultimately, it may be that the differences are just too wide," the president told ABC before going to Capitol Hill.

RBP
03-14-2013, 06:25 PM
No they are cutting nothing. Awesome idea.

PorkChopSandwiches
03-14-2013, 06:29 PM
http://i46.tinypic.com/27xmlg0.jpg

Teh One Who Knocks
03-14-2013, 06:31 PM
No they are cutting nothing. Awesome idea.

:nono:


The plan also calls for replacing the recent, $85 billion in spending cuts with more measured cuts.

:tup:

RBP
03-14-2013, 06:49 PM
:nono:

:tup:


$100 billion in new spending and $85 billion in cuts = cutting? Only in Washington :facepalm:

Not to mention that fact that those cuts are already in effect.

Acid Trip
03-14-2013, 07:03 PM
The budget grows government 65% over the next 10 years. It puts us near a $6 trillion/year government budget. There is no way the US economy will grow fast enough to cover an expansion that large. It'll be over 33% of the total economy!

If anything remotely close to that passes it's all over.

PorkChopSandwiches
03-14-2013, 07:06 PM
*runs for office*

perrhaps
03-14-2013, 07:19 PM
"runs for cover"

RBP
03-14-2013, 07:19 PM
The budget grows government 65% over the next 10 years. It puts us near a $6 trillion/year government budget. There is no way the US economy will grow fast enough to cover an expansion that large. It'll be over 33% of the total economy!

If anything remotely close to that passes it's all over.

Where did you see that?

Teh One Who Knocks
03-14-2013, 07:19 PM
*runs for office*

*just runs*

PorkChopSandwiches
03-14-2013, 08:43 PM
*gets a case of the runs*

Acid Trip
03-14-2013, 08:57 PM
Where did you see that?

My mistake, it was a 62% increase.

http://www.thune.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2013/3/senate-democrats-budget-grows-government-not-economy

Washington, D.C. - Senator John Thune (R-S.D.), Chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, issued the following statement regarding the budget proposal unveiled by Senate Democrats this evening:

“After four years and nearly $6 trillion added to our national debt, today the Senate Democrats finally unveiled their budget blueprint. Republicans hoped that the Democrats’ budget proposal would include policies that would stimulate economic growth, including reining in Washington’s dangerous levels of spending and debt. Instead, Senate Democrats today proposed a budget that would increase spending by 62 percent over the next decade, and would never balance. Their budget would raise taxes on Americans by $1.5 trillion to pay for increased spending—this is on top of the $1.7 trillion in tax increases already signed into law during the Obama administration. The policies of big spending and big government have led to a dismal average economic growth rate of just 0.8 percent over the past four years. It’s time to grow the economy, not the government.”