GOP rejects Obama’s $4.1 trillion budget, secret ‘Black Budget’ requests as debt rises
As the New Hampshire primaries steal the headlines, President Obama submitted his final budget Tuesday, a $4.1 trillion annual budget plan — deemed “dead on arrival” to the Republican-controlled Congress.
Despite campaigning to be the “most transparent administration in history” the Obama administration declined to say how much the budget seeks to bill taxpayers for individual spy agencies. One release points to an aggregate request for non-military intelligence agencies, $53.5 billion for fiscal year 2017, which is a required disclosure by the ODNI.
“Reflecting the Administration’s commitment to transparency and open government, this Budget continues the practice begun in 2012 of disclosing the President’s aggregate funding request for the [National Intelligence Program],” the ODNI says in a fact sheet, referring to the umbrella term for non-military spy agencies.
“That’s a business as usual claim,” retorts Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt. “There is no transparency there — they’re complying with the thinnest of laws about the [aggregate] number. Members of Congress and the American public really are learning nothing.”
Welch says he and many of his colleagues first learned of individual spy agency appropriations from Snowden, who released to the Washington Post information about the fiscal 2013 budget, revealing $14.7 billion in funding for the CIA and $10.8 billion for the NSA that year.
The “Black Budget” requests is just part of the outrage for a massive budget plan.
Over the next decade the Obama administration confessed that the deficit would increase amid increased spending on older Americans’ health care.
“The budget is a road map to a future that embodies America’s values and aspirations: a future of opportunity and security for all of our families; a rising standard of living; and a sustainable, peaceful planet for our kids,” Obama wrote in a message to lawmakers. “This future is within our reach. But just as it took the collective efforts of the American people to rise from the recession and rebuild an even stronger economy, so will it take all of us working together to meet the challenges that lie ahead.”
The Obamacare “Cadillac Tax” has been delayed until 2020 with most economists believing Congress will push back the starting date even farther into the future — a pattern likely to repeat itself over and over again, so that the tax never actually takes effect.
In 2012, Forbes noted that “Consequently, by Election Day 2012, Obama will have doubled the national debt, in just one term of office. In that one term, he added as much to the national debt as all prior Presidents, from George Washington to George Bush, combined!…By 2022, Obama’s own budget projects that national debt held by the public to total nearly $20 trillion!”
2022? In 2015, the debt clock clicked over $19 trillion
CBO data on previous budgets:
2008: $2.98 trillion
2009: $3.27 trillion
2010: $3.46 trillion
2011: $3.60 trillion
2012: $3.65 trillion
2013: $3.72 trillion