President Barack Obama’s budget for fiscal year 2015 will add $8.3 trillion to the debt and hike taxes by $1.8 trillion, according to a joint analysis by Republicans on the Senate and House budget committees.
The president unveiled his budget a month late at Powell Elementary School in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, calling his plan "balanced and responsible."
"These kids may not be the most excited people in town on budget day, but my budget is designed with their generation and future generations in mind," he said.
The president said his budget would "make smart investments" to address global warming, provide "preschool for all," and ensure that the wealthy are "paying their fair share."
"At a time when our deficits have been cut in half, it allows us to meet our obligations for future generations without leaving them a mountain of debt," he said.
However, Republicans on the Senate and House budget committees found that the president’s proposal never balances and will add $8.3 trillion to the debt over the next 10 years.
Since Obama took office in 2009, the debt has increased by $6.8 trillion to a total of $17.463 trillion. Based on the president’s budget proposal, gross debt would reach $25 trillion in 2024, according to the GOP analysis.
The proposal also increases spending by $791 billion over 10 years. Spending would rise $114 billion in 2015, $56 billion above the bipartisan budget agreement that the president signed into law on Dec. 26.
Overall, spending would increase 63 percent over the next 10 years.
Sen. John Thune (R., S.D.) said Obama’s budget "merely panders to his political base."
"Despite the fact that household income is down by $3,600 since the president took office, and the labor participation rate is at its lowest level since Jimmy Carter was president, President Obama is proposing more of the same policies to grow the government at the expense of the middle class," Thune said in a statement.
Ranking Member of the Senate Budget Committee Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.) said the president’s budget "bursts through" spending levels that Congress agreed to two months before.
"Just days ago the director of the Congressional Budget Office sounded the alarm over our nation’s ‘unsustainable’ debt path and ‘the risk of a fiscal crisis,’" he said. "But President Obama has ignored the warning and submitted a budget plan that bursts through the Ryan-Murray spending caps he agreed to when signed them into law. With this proposal, the president has chosen not merely to disregard, but to hide the dangers we face."
"This budget betrays both our responsibility to Americans today—struggling to get by in this slow growth, high debt economy—and to our children, who will inherit perhaps the greatest debt any nation has ever accrued," Sessions said.
Obama’s budgets have failed to garner a single vote, even from Democrats, in previous years. His proposals in 2011 and 2012 were unanimously rejected in the Senate, and the House voted down his 2013 budget plan by a 0-414 vote.