Politics

Obama’s budget spikes annual debt payments near $1 trillion

Neil Munro White House Correspondent
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The president’s 10-year budget plan would pump the federal government’s annual credit-card charges up to $838 billion in 2024, almost four times the 2014 cost of $227 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

The expected interest payments rise because Obama’s 10-year plan would add $6.6 trillion to the federal debt, which has already risen $7 trillion since he was inaugurated in 2009, according to the CBO report.

“The President’s policies do little to change the nation’s dangerous debt trajectory, [so] interest costs climb and gross federal debt continues to soar,” according to an April 17 statement by the top GOP senator on the Senate budget committee, Sen. Jeff Sessions.

“Interest costs [will] exceed base defense spending in 2019, just five years from now,” Sessions added.

The debt is now roughly $17.5 trillion, up from $10.6 trillion in January 2009.

The budget request also violates the budget deal that Obama approved last December.

The “CBO’s report confirms that the President would increase FY 2015 discretionary (that is, annually appropriated) spending $56 billion above the Ryan-Murray spending caps, which he just signed into law in December,” and raise $1 trillion more in taxes, said the Sessions statement.

Obama’s budget request for 2015 would add $509 billion to the debt, if Congress approves the plan.

No-one expects Congress to approve the plan — but few expect Republicans, Democrats and Obama to develop a new plan that would actually slow the growing debt below the currently expected debt of $26.4 trillion in 2024.

Obama’s 10-year plan includes a variety of budgetary fictions, including the claim that Congress will pass the Senate’s unpopular plan to increase the inflow of foreign workers and legal immigrants up to 40 million over the next decade. That inflow is so large that it is roughly equal to the number of American men and women who are expected to enter the workforce over the next decade.

The budget plan assumes that the extra workers would increase federal revenues by roughly $158 in social security taxes.

Roughly $6.3 trillion in subsequent revenue, however, would have to be used to fund the immigrants’ retirement costs, according to a May 2013 Heritage Foundation study.

The immigration plan would also cut workers’ share of the nation’s income, and increase investors’ share, according to a 2013 CBO study. Workers’ share of national income is already at a 63-year low.

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