Ellison, Progressive Caucus: Raise taxes, boost spending, don’t worry about balancing

WASHINGTON — Not 15 feet from the committee room where a House panel was marking up a GOP budget plan on Wednesday, Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison and members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus stood by, trying simply to change the conversation.

The group was introducing the caucus’s own budget, called the Back to Work Budget, a quixotic attempt to raise a bevy of taxes, spend more than $1 trillion on public work projects over 10 years and create, by the group’s count, 7 million jobs next year alone.

The budget has no chance of passage, and if previous years are a guide, even most Democrats will vote against it if it comes to floor. But Ellison said the budget has a purpose anyway: Turning the focus in Washington from deficit reduction to job creation.

“It’s so important, this sea change in the Back to Work Budget, this flip from an obsession on just debt and deficit towards jobs,” he said. “That is the big shift.”

The Back to Work Budget is essentially the complete opposite of the GOP budget introduced by Rep. Paul Ryan on Tuesday.

• The progressives raise taxes on everyone making more than $250,000, creating a top rate of 49 percent on income above $1 billion; the GOP would create only two tax rates (10 percent and 25 percent).
• The GOP would repeal the Affordable Care Act; the progressives would create a public health insurance option.
• The GOP would boost defense spending by $500 billion over 10 years; Pentagon spending cuts are directly spelled out in the Back to Work Budget.*
• Over 10 years, the CPC would spend trillions of dollars on everything from infrastructure to education grants to states; the Republican budget imposes deeper discretionary spending cuts than those in current law.

About the only place the two budgets might overlap is in the area of tax reform, but there key differences there, as well. In order to pay for lower tax rates while also balancing the budget, Ryan said Tuesday that Republicans would need to end certain loopholes and deductions in the tax code, but didn’t say which ones. The Back to Work Budget targets long-time liberal hang-ups like tax breaks for oil companies and deductions for corporate jets, which the CPC says will lead to $4.4 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years.

“This is not an alternative; this is a choice,” Rep. Raul Grijalva, Ellison’s CPC co-chair, said. “It’s not just a question of choosing between the lesser of two evils; It is a choice between this country moving forward and continuing to regress.”

The bottom line: In 10 years, the Republican budget would balance, spending $4.9 trillion in 2023. The Back to Work Budget doesn’t balance, runs a trillion-dollar deficit next fiscal year and spends $5.9 trillion in 2023.

But at the budget rollout on Wednesday, members of the Progressive Caucus said that’s OK. Their budget, by their count, would create 7 million new jobs in 2014 and reduce unemployment to around 5.3 percent. And relative to the Republican budget, with spending cuts, changes to Medicare and across-the-board tax breaks, they’re willing to live without a balanced budget.

“The conversation needs to be how we get people back to work,” Ellison said. “The conversation in this country needs to be, ‘Which budget puts more people back to work,’ not, ‘How much do we cut?’”

The Progressive Caucus budget failed on a 78-346 vote last year, and will certainly meet the same fate if it’s brought to the floor this year.

*Note: A former version of this story said Pentagon cuts were the only ones spelled out in the Back to Work Budget. That was incorrect. According to Ellison’s office, “The budget includes significant cuts to the things we don’t need so we can protect the things we do. We cut wasteful agriculture subsidies that benefit corporations at the expense of family farmers, energy subsidies that benefit polluters, and health care spending that benefits administrators instead of patients, to name a few.”

Devin Henry can be reached at dhenry@minnpost.com. Follow him on Twitter: @dhenry