Obama Budget Raises Taxes, Ignores Spending Cuts, CBO Says

Kevin Glass | March 16, 2012 12:18 PM

The Congressional Budget Office came out with their summary what President Obama's budget would do to the fiscal health of the United States today. Turns out that the President does little to address the long-term fiscal crisis that the United States faces and thinks the primary way to try to address budget deficits is to raise taxes.

The debt held by the U.S. government would go from 67% of GDP this year to 76% in 2022 if President Obama's budget is passed - or, in other words, from $10 trillion this year to almost $19 trillion. What's more, while the budget shrinks the deficit as a percentage of GDP between this year and 2017, deficits would once again be on an unsustainable track upwards beginning then - and the budget has no serious plan to deal with the entitlements putting us on that road to ruin.

Unsurprisingly, the CBO pulled the curtain back on the Obama Administration's own estimates of its budgetary prowess. President Obama claimed he was nearly $300 billion better at deficit reduction than the CBO does, in large part because the President thinks his tax hikes will raise more revenue than the CBO does.

Additionally, the CBO writes, President Obama has every intention of completely ignoring last year's debt ceiling deal that detailed a comprehensive medium-term spending cuts plan.

Automatic procedures specified by last year’s Budget Control Act are set to go into effect in January 2013 and reduce spending in subsequent years.5 The President’s budget does not include those reductions, thereby boosting outlays relative to the current-law baseline by $1.0 trillion over the next 10 years.

President Obamas budget also would further complicate the tax code when simplification is needed - his plans are to increase the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit and some education tax credits, totaling over $350 billion dollars.

For an in-depth look at the details of Obama's budget, see Guy Benson here.