Progressive caucus rolls out new budget

The Congressional Progressive Caucus unveiled its more liberal budget vision on Wednesday, with a framework that calls for tax hikes on the wealthy and a range of initiatives aimed at helping the middle class.

{mosads}The caucus says the budget would create close to nine million jobs by 2017, while also providing just over $4 trillion in deficit reduction over a decade.

“During our economy’s best decades, Congress invested in the American workforce and every family was better off for it,” the caucus says in introducing the budget.

“But recent years have been dominated by growing inequality and a Republican majority in Congress obsessed with slashing the budget, making it harder for working Americans to find decent jobs and save for the future.”

The more liberal budget vision has no chance of gaining traction in the House, where top Republicans recently panned President Obama’s latest budget as a political document that doesn’t tackle the country’s long-term problems with entitlement programs.

Moving in the other direction, the progressive budget repeals the across-the-board sequestration cuts and calls for expanded Social Security benefits. The budget would also boost infrastructure spending and aid to the long-term unemployed and states.

Plus, it assumes that a comprehensive immigration overhaul is enacted, and tries to bring more transparency to national security budgets, a response to recent revelations about data collection.

On the tax side, the progressives want to install a top tax bracket of 49 percent for income over $1 billion a year, as well as a range of new brackets for income of at least seven figures. 

It also scraps a provision that allows multinationals to defer paying taxes on offshore income, implements a tax on financial transactions and even steals a page from the new draft from House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.).

The budget takes Camp’s tax on large banks, underscoring the concern of Republicans who feared that Democrats would scour Camp’s draft for potential ideas.