The president will use the next round of budget negotiations to press for tax increases, White House spokesman Jay Carney said Wednesday.
“The president has insisted that in these budgets negotiations… everything has to be on the table, and that will be his position going forward,” Carney said at the midday press conference.
The April budget request is “what he believes is a fair approach to resolving our budget challenges is reflected in the budget he submitted,” although the president doesn’t expect to win all he seeks, Carney said.
Obama also wants to end the 2011 sequester deficit plan, which trimmed federal spending by $1 trillion over 10 years. “Sequester does not fit the bill,” Carney told the reporters.
Obama will also push for passage of the Senate immigration rewrite that would add 33 million immigrants over the next 10 years.
The inflow would add one new immigrant to the labor force for every two Americans who turn 18, despite a stalled economy that has left 20 million Americans unemployed or underemployed. The bill would also shift more of the nation’s income from wage-earners to investors, according to a June report by the Congressional Budget Office.
The measures included in the Senate bill are also unpopular. Only one-in-eight centrist voters back an amnesty, according to an October survey conducted for NBC by the firm that did polling for Obama in the 2012 race.
However, the Senate bill would add 10 million Democratic-leading immigrant citizens by 2024, according to an October report by the Center for Immigration Studies.
The Senate immigration bill “is the right thing to do, and we’re going to push for it,” Carney said.
All of these goals are unpopular among swing-voters, but they’re backed by the long-standing alliance of D.C.-based lobbyists, progressive groups and media outlets. For example, 300 business leaders and progressive activists are expected to visit Congress Oct. 28 to press for passage of the immigration-boosting bill.
Carney’s promise of a push for more taxes, spending and immigration followed Obama’s tactical victory in the partial government shutdown, when he defeated the GOP’s demand for reforms of Obamacare.
Obama’s budget goals amount to a fundamental transformation of the economy which will leave Americans poorer and with less control of their financial lives, while enabling vast spending increases by progressives in Washington. “The revenue from all the tax increases he proposes, minus the minor tax cuts he proposes, add up to more than $1 trillion over 10 years,” according to a May report on Obama’s 2014 budget by the Heritage Foundation.
The Senate deal to end the partial shutdown schedules a new round of budget negotiations to decide 2014 spending levels.
During the impasse, Democrats repeatedly promised to reverse the 2011 sequester cuts, which trimmed the federal government’s spending by $1 trillion over the next decade.
