Obama’s budget would add $10.6 trillion in federal debt

c/o Senate Budget Committee

President Obama’s budget will add almost $11 trillion to the federal debt over the next ten years, according to the ranking member on the Senate Budget Committee.

Obama’s budget, which was unanimously voted down in the House and the Senate, would increase the national debt to $25.4 trillion by 2022, according to the office of Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., which studied the update filed by Obama’s Office of Management and Budget.

Sessions’ office noted that the president’s budget is consistent with his claims that the country can “pay down our debt in a balanced way” by raising taxes on the wealthy. “[T]he President’s call for tax increases would not be used to reduce deficits, but rather to fund new spending,” his office said.

The updated budget outlook contradicts the White House’s claims earlier this year. “Our budget will get us, over the next several years, to the point where we can look the American people in the eye and say we’re not adding to the debt anymore; we’re spending money that we have each year, and then we can work on bringing down our national debt,” White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew told CNN in February.

Sessions’ team said that the updated budget would run a minimum annual deficit of $534 billion over the next decade. In 2003, Obama attacked then-President Bush for running a $300 billion deficit. “I think this is a testimony to the destructive and misguided fiscal policy of the Bush Administration,” he said at the time.