FACT SHEET: Sham Budget Resolution Nearly Doubles the Deficit and Explodes the National Debt
Republicans Turn Their Backs on Years of Alleged Fiscal Responsibility to Tear Health Insurance Away from 30 Million and Make America Sick Again
The Republican budget isn’t just an attack on the middle class, it’s proof that their past rhetoric on deficits has been a sham.
The budget would increase the annual deficit to more than $1 trillion from less than a billion today [Section1101(4), S.Con.Res.3]
Over the next ten years, public debt would increase by $9 trillion [from about $20 trillion to roughly $29 trillion]. [Section 1101(5), S.Con.Res.3]
The budget also includes a loophole to exempt their health care replacement bill from the Republicans’ own rule to enforce long-term fiscal discipline. [A point of order against legislation increasing the deficit by more than $5 billion in any of the four decades beyond the current budget window.] [Section 3002, S.Con.Res.3]
It creates another loophole so that Republicans can add to the deficit in any given year over the next ten without paying for it this decade. [Section 3002, S.Con.Res.3]
This budget is designed to do one thing: gut the Affordable Care Act.
If Republicans were successful in overturning the entire law, they’d be adding $353 billion to the deficit over 10 years, according to CBO, and an even larger sum in future decades.
By contrast, President Obama’s final budget would have reduced the deficit by almost half in the tenth year [OMB baseline for 2026 was $1.415 trillion deficit; Obama budget called for $793 billion], but Republicans thought that effort was so unserious that they didn’t even hold a hearing. And now they have proposed a budget that doesn’t even bother with the pretense of deficit reduction. [Budget Of The United States Government, Fiscal Year 2017, S.Con.Res.3.]
