(VIDEO) Sessions to Obama's Budget Director: Your ideas will never work

http://youtu.be/5dENaCFek0M
(Video above: Sen. Jeff Sessions grills Obama’s Budget Director Shaun Donovan)

WASHINGTON — Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) on Tuesday turned up the heat on President Obama’s budget director Shaun Donovan during a contentious committee hearing on the Administration’s proposed budget for the 2016 fiscal year.

“Working Americans today are not doing well. Since 2007 the median income is down $4,000 for a family. This is catastrophic (and) it’s accelerated under (President Obama’s) watch,” said Sessions. “The problem is your policies — tax more, spend more, borrow more, regulate more, ObamaCare more — and an immigration policy that dominates the market with workers from abroad when we don’t have enough jobs for American workers.

“We’ve got a problem, but your ideas will not work, they will never work,” he continued before asking Donovan a pointed question. “Does your budget spend more or less than we agreed to with President Obama in the Budget Control Act of 2011?”

Donovan recited his oft-repeated line that the President’s budget “overall reduces spending relative to current law,” but was quickly cut off by an increasingly exasperated Sessions.

“One of the ways you fix a budget problem is when you agree to a spending limit you stick to it, so I’m going to ask you one more time — let’s just see if we can get this straight, the American people need to know — do you propose to spend more next year than the Budget Control Act would allow?” Sessions asked again.

While Donovan would never fully admit that the President’s budget would increase spending, he did finally relent that the Administration proposes lifting the spending caps.

In addition to calling for an end to so-called sequestration—the automatic spending cuts put in place by Congress in 2011—President Obama’s proposed budget asks for nearly $4 trillion in spending and adds almost half a trillion to the federal debt over the next year.

Obama’s budget proposes to lower the deficit by a cumulative $1.8 trillion over the next decade by ramping up taxes on high earners, including a one-time 14% tax on profits earned abroad by US corporations. Future earnings would be taxed at 19%. The 2,000-page budget would also increase the capital gains tax, which is paid by many middle class Americans, including farmers. Overall, the plan would add approximately $8.5 trillion to the federal debt over the next ten years.

GOP members of Congress are set in the Spring to propose their own budget, which will almost certainly be at odds with the President’s.

You can see Sessions must-watch exchange with Donovan in the video above.