This Is Budget We Waited Four Years For?

News flash: Senate Democrats pass a budget out of committee that includes massive tax increases, dramatically increases spending, is never projected to come close to balancing the budget, and in a tip of the hat to George Orwell, they call it “balanced” in its approach.

Is there any doubt why House Republicans found it nearly impossible to find budget solutions with a group so far out of touch?

While the Democrats claim $1.85 trillion in budget “cuts” over the next 10 years, the reality is starkly different as Senate Budget Committee ranking member Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) explained …

Testimony from [Budget] Committee staff clearly established that compared to current law, their alleged deficit reduction is nowhere close to $1.85 trillion, and by their own admission, is actually only about $700 billion. Removing gimmicks like the war savings accounting trick, the true deficit reduction is only around $300 billion — drastically less than the majority advertises to the nation. That is why, despite a $1.5 trillion tax increase, their budget still make no alteration to our unsustainable debt path.

In fact under the Senate Democratic budget, total annual outlays (spending) rise by $2.1 trillion over the next 10 years, a 61 percent increase. At the same time, taxes would go up for the 50 percent of working-age Americans who still pay them.

And they’re not talking small tax increases, but a massive $1.5 trillion. But that’s not all, because the Senate budget doesn’t count $600 billion in new taxes imposed in January and the $1.1 trillion in new ObamaCare taxes slated to go into effect.

These three tax increases combined equal more money than the United States government has ever collected in a single year. And this is on top of existing taxes.

In a nutshell, the Senate Democratic budget explains for the first time to America why our nation has catapulted from government-funding crisis to government-funding crisis over the past three years.

House Republicans, who this author has criticized for not being strong enough in the debate over our nation’s fiscal path, have fought against this notion that government should destroy the incentive to produce wealth through higher taxes, and the overriding assumption that in 10 years from now the government should be spending $2.1 trillion more than it does today.

For perspective, $2.1 trillion is only slightly less than the $2.16 trillion in total revenues collected by the United States government in 2010.

That’s right. The Senate Democrats want to increase spending in the next 10 years by as much money as the entire government brought in just two fiscal years ago.

Now that the Senate Democrats have come out of hiding with their big budget reveal, House Republicans should be taking victory laps back home for having defeated them over the past two years as they successfully lowered overall federal government spending to $3.53 trillion in 2012, down from Obama’s estimated 2012 outlays of $3.78 trillion. Democrats, on the other hand, should be shaking in their boots.

Should make for an interesting 2014.

Rick Manning is communications director of Americans for Limited Government and the former Public Affairs Chief of Staff at the U.S. Department of Labor. Follow him on Twitter @RManning957. This piece – reprinted with permission – originally appeared in The Hill.