March continued the string of dismal employment reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics with every sector besides health care shedding jobs. The unemployement rate jumped to 8.5% in March - that is the highest unemployment rate in 25 years.
In light of the bleak unemployment numbers and economic outlook, Heritage scholars James Sherk and J.D. Foster pointed out the following:
"These discouraging numbers underscore that Congress should not embark on an anti-growth taxing and spending frenzy. Unfortunately President Obama’s budget currently before Congress would do just that, increasing spending by more than $1,000,000,000,000–one trillion dollars–over the next decade."
Yet an anti-growth tax & spend frenzy is exactly what Team Obama has in mind. The President proposes to raise taxes significantly on upper-income families and small businesses by raising income tax rates on ordinary income, increasing tax rates on dividends and capital gains, preserving the death tax at onerous levels, restoring the previous phase-outs of the itemized deduction and personal exemptions, and creating a new cap on the rate at which individuals can deduct itemized deductions.
Obama's budget represents a 25% spending increase which marks the largest non-war government expansion since the New Deal. The Obama budget leaves permanent deficits averaging $600 billion even after the economy recovers and doubles the publicly held national debt to over $15 trillion ($12.5 trillion in 2009 dollars).
This is precisely the wrong time to burden the economy with higher taxes and additional wasteful government spending. Remember, if government spending got us out of recessions, why would we ever have recessions? We’d just spend our way out of everything.
But fear not. If worse come to worse, and we can’t pay off all our debt, we’ve got this whole group of cheap, unskilled laborers to pick up the slack:
And for those who would accuse the Republicans of merely playing politics while failing to provide a plan of their own, you should note that there are now two 10-year budget plans being offered in Washington. The Obama budget raises taxes by $1.4 trillion; the conservative Alternative avoids all tax increases and even simplifies the tax code.
Senator Jim DeMint’s “American Option” would have reduced business taxes from 35 percent to 25 percent to spur rapid growth in wages, jobs and business incomes. It also would have permanently repealed the Alternative Minimum Tax and reduced the individual tax rate to three levels—10, 15, and 25 percent—giving Americans more of their own money to fuel the economy and increasing disposable income for an average family of four by up to $4,500 by 2013.
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