Senator Jeff Sessions (R, AL), Ranking Member of the Senate Budget Committee, had some in his opening remarks at last Wednesday’s Committee hearing on the President Barack Obama’s FY2015 budget proposal (Treasury Secretary Jack Lew was the opening witness here).

Thank you, Secretary Lew, for appearing before us today.

In 2009, the Administration wagered America’s financial future on the idea that a record increase in government spending and debt would revive the economy.

Since then, government debt has increased 64% and is on track to double by the end of the President’s second term.  What are the results?

• America is in the midst of slowest recovery since the end of World War II.
• Workforce participation has shrunk to a nearly 40-year low.
• The Labor Department reports that most occupations pay less today than they did when the President took office.
• Government debt has leaped from roughly $10 trillion to $17 trillion, yet median income has dropped $2,268 per household over that same time, and the decline has actually accelerated.

This is a huge disaster.

The justification for this unprecedented accumulation of debt was the claim that it would lead to prosperity.  And yet now, we have none of the prosperity and all of the debt.  This plan has proven to be one of the most costly failed gambits in American history.  The White House’s average 2013 growth projection in their 2009 through 2012 budgets was 3.9%.  Economic growth is critical for America’s workers-translating into higher wages and better jobs with benefits.

But actual growth last year came in at half what was projected, 1.9%—a huge difference with real impact on millions of Americans.  For example, CBO has repeatedly said that the Administration’s $870 billion stimulus bill would be a long-term drag on the economy.

So what does the President propose in his new budget?

The plan increases spending growth by almost $1 trillion, bursting through the Ryan-Murray spending caps he signed into law only two months ago.

So, while the military gets hammered, other agency budgets soar.  The White House proposes the following increases next year:

• A 45% increase for the Department of Housing and Urban Development
• An 18% increase for the Legal Services Corporation
• A 15% increase for the Department of Energy
• A 30% increase for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and
• A 7% increase for the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection.

The plan also raises taxes more than $1 trillion—in addition to the $1.7 trillion in taxes he’s already enacted.  New proposed taxes include:

• Limit the value of itemized deductions to raise taxes by almost $600 billion.
• Raise the death tax and reduce the exclusion to increase taxes by over $100 billion.
• Increase taxes on unemployment insurance by $78 billion.
• Increase taxes on energy production by $49 billion.

So the President raises taxes to increase spending.  It is a tax-and-spend budget that will never pass. Altogether, the White House budget plan would add another $8 trillion to our $17 trillion debt.

The seriousness of the situation is demonstrated by this fact: last year, we paid our creditors $221 billion in interest on our federal debt.  Under the President’s plan, according to his own numbers, annual interest payments will nearly quadruple to $812 billion.

Rising interest payments represent arguably the gravest threat to our nation’s financial security.

Should interest rates increase even slightly above projections, the costs of financing our debt would quickly surge to emergency levels.  As the Director of the Congressional Budget Office warned, we face “the risk of a fiscal crisis.”

Clearly, we must pursue a new course that creates jobs and that does not add to our debt.  Here’s how:

• Produce more American energy to create jobs right here in the US
• Streamline the tax code and lower rates to make America more globally competitive
• Eliminate every unnecessary regulation that destroys jobs
• Adopt a trade policy that defends the legitimate interests of US workers
• Enforce an immigration policy that serves American workers
• Turn the welfare office into a job a training center
• Make government leaner, doing more with less
• Balance the budget to restore confidence and growth

A couple of idle thoughts: That addition of $8 trillion to our debt by the Obama budget is an optimistic figure, depending on interest rates not rising, despite the Fed’s OEx programs and easy money position.

For perspective on how the Obama budget debt payment growth fits in with the other growths projected from his budget, see here.  [Note: the article is behind Ricochet‘s pay wall.  I strongly recommend you subscribe; it’s well worth the $29.95 per year.]

Other than that, what Senator Sessions said.

In years past, Obama had offered to trim cost-of-living increases in Social Security and other benefit programs—known as chained CPI.  Not anymore.

The Obama administration also has taken to making this claim:

Social Security has not contributed one penny to the deficit.

This, of course, is mendaciously false—it’s government spending, and the government is spending more than it takes in.  The only thing is the bookkeeping fiction that it’s off-budget, and so (so the claim goes) that deficit spending doesn’t exist.  But this meme depends on a carefully distorted definition of the official “deficit”—that of being only an on-the-books deficit, and not including the off-the-books spending that is Social Security (and Medicare).

But, maybe Obama would reconsider.

“The president was willing to step forward and put on the table a concrete proposal.  Unfortunately Republicans refused to even consider the possibility of raising some revenue by closing some loopholes that benefit only the wealthy and well connected,” [White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Josh] Earnest said.  Officials said Thursday that those potential reductions in spending, included in last year’s Obama budget, had been designed to initiate negotiations with Republicans over how to reduce future deficits and the nation’s debt.  But Republicans never accepted Obama’s calls for higher tax revenue to go along with the cuts.

Never mind that the only legitimate uses of closing loopholes are two: to reduce tax rates, and to pay down the national debt.

Beyond that, government doesn’t need more tax revenue; although it would get more, even at lower tax rates, if it got out of the way of the economy and let that grow.  Government needs to cut pending to below collected tax revenue, and it needs to use the increased revenue from loophole closing (all loopholes, including, say, tax credits for “green” energy boondoggles, not just those convenient to Democrats) to reduce tax rates even further—and then keep that tighter lid on spending.

[Obama’s latest budget proposal] says deficits as a share of the economy will be below 2% after 2025.

In other words, Obama continues to ignore our out of control national debt, since those deficits can only continue to add to the debt.