Democrats Set To Announce Plan With $1 Trillion In New Taxes And No Path To A Balanced Budget

It involved big tax cuts, eliminating Obamacare, and big cuts to virtually all categories of spending.

Today it's the Democrats' turn. The Democrats will introduce their first formal "budget" in 4 years at a press conference at 10:30.

Erik Wasson at The Hill reports on what will be in it:

The first budget from Senate Democrats in four years includes nearly $1 trillion in new taxes but would not balance the budget.

The blueprint unveiled by Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray (D-Wash.) on Tuesday to her Democratic colleagues would also turn off the next nine years of the sequester and replace those spending cuts with a 50-50 mix of tax increases and spending cuts.

A key thing is that the Democrats are going to get panned for never getting to "balance" as Paul Ryan says he does in 10 years.

And though it's true that a balanced budget sounds nice politically, it's economically pointless as Evan Soltas explained at Bloomberg View yesterday. As long as the deficit is lower than nominal GDP growth in the year, the total national debt is shrinking relative to the size of the economy. And for traditional measures of debt sustainability, that's what matters.