Obama Budget Rejected by House in 414-0 Vote

The House of Representatives rejected the Obama administration’s proposed budget 414-to-0; it failed to get a single Democratic vote. As Ed Morrissey noted, “the President wants to keep proposing massive deficits, increased spending, and higher taxes . . . This is the second year in a row that Obama’s budget couldn’t win a single Democratic vote in Congress. In parliamentary systems, that would be a vote of no confidence and the party would be looking for new leadership.”

While the GOP-controlled House has just passed a budget plan of its own, the Democratic-controlled Senate has not passed a single budget during the Obama Administration, leaving the country without an official budget for over a thousand days. Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) acknowledged that “there’s no excuse” for Senate Democrats’ failure to pass a budget, and that a state governor might face impeachment for similarly failing to put together a budget. Senate Democrats don’t want to pass a budget containing all the spending they’ve authorized through individual spending bills, since doing so would further expose their complicity in the Obama administration’s record deficit spending. During the Obama administration, the federal government has run up the largest budget deficits in history; the Obama administration ran up more red ink in just one month (February 2010) than the Bush administration ran up in an entire year (all of 2007). In the 2008 campaign, Obama promised a “net spending cut,” but as soon as he was elected, he proposed massive spending increases.

One way to reduce trillion-dollar deficits would be to pass legislation eliminating obstacles to economic growth. The more the economy grows, the more tax revenue the government will have. But Obama administration policies have created more obstacles to job creation, and are preventing the economy from recovering at a rapid rate. Liz Peek writes in Fiscal Times about “How Obamacare Derailed the Economic Recovery.” As we noted earlier, Obamacare is causing layoffs in the medical device industry, is discouraging employers from hiring, and is reducing capital investment needed for future hiring and expansion. The Dodd-Frank law pushed through Congress by the Obama administration has also wiped out jobs and driven thousands of jobs overseas.