Republicans confirmed Monday that President Obama’s $4 trillion budget will never be considered in GOP-led Congress.
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, led the criticism of the president’s annual spending blueprint, which calls for raising taxes for the wealthy to fund tax breaks for lower-income earners and new programs such as a $60 billion plan to offer students free community college.
“Today President Obama laid out a plan for more taxes, more spending and more of the Washington gridlock that has failed middle-class families,” Boehner said. “It may be Groundhog Day, but the American people can’t afford a repeat of the same old top-down policies of the past.”
Top lawmakers on the House Budget Committee also dismissed the proposal, pointing out that it does not include measures to reduce the nation’s staggering debt.
“The president is advocating more spending, more taxes and more debt,” House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price, R-Ga., said. “As we have seen over the past several years, that approach will yield less opportunity for the middle class and a crushing burden of debt that threatens both our future prosperity and our national security.”
Democrats praised the plan for its focus on middle-class economics.
“I am very glad that the president’s budget lays out a vision for a government and an economy that prioritizes jobs, middle class families and broad-based economic growth,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee.
Murray said the plan offered areas where the two parties can work together, pointing to the 2013 bipartisan budget agreement that reversed defense and domestic budget cuts.
But Republicans are not optimistic, noting that the White House has conceded it is unlikely Congress will take up any of the major proposals in the budget.
Republicans accused Obama of proposing a plan that is more about messaging than working with the GOP majority.
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, called the plan “a nonstarter with Congress.”
“A $4 trillion government spending spree propped up by massive new take hikes, this budget blueprint shamelessly panders to the Democratic base and does nothing to put our nation back on a sound fiscal footing,” said Hatch, the Senate Finance Committee chairman. “Rather than creating a simpler, fairer, more competitive tax system, it adds complexity and confusion.”
Republicans soon will announce their own spending plan that will “address our government’s spending problem and protect our national security,” Boehner said.
“Our budget will balance, and it will help promote job creation and higher wages, not more government bureaucracy,” he added.
Like Obama’s plan, however, a GOP budget stands little chance of being implemented because of opposition from Senate Democrats and Obama.
