What do Democrats have against balanced budgets?

Senator Jeff Sessions  offered a motion tonight to send Patty Murray’s Senate budget back to committee
with instructions to re-do it in any way necessary to produce a balanced
budget.

There were no caveats to how this should be done – Senators were simply voting to accept or reject the very principle of balancing the federal budget within 10 years. Text of the motion follows:

Mr. Sessions moves to commit S. Con. Res. 8 back to the Committee on the Budget with instructions to report back no later than March 22, 2013 with such changes as may be necessary to achieve unified budget balance by fiscal year 2023.

 Every Democrat Senator except for Sen. Joe Manchin voted
against this measure.

The Hill reported:

The motion was defeated on a 46 to 53 vote. Sen.
Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) joined with the united Republican conference to
support it.


 “Tonight the American people witnessed a remarkable and alarming event:
the Senate’s Democrat majority declared they do not want to balance the
budget, will not balance the budget, and will oppose any effort to
balance the budget in any way,” Sessions said after the vote.

Obama explained the Democrats’ priorities in an interview, last week:

“My goal is not to chase a balanced budget just for the sake of balance,” Obama said in an interview aired on ABC’s “Good Morning America” March 13, the day after Ryan released his proposed budget. “My goal is, how do we grow the economy, put people back to work, and if we do that, we’re going be bringing in more revenue.”

In fact, the Democrat plan is to keep doing what they do best: taxing and spending as Peter Ferrara recently wrote in Forbes:

The Senate Democrats propose to increase current obese spending by an
additional $2.1 trillion per year by 2023, when they propose to spend
$733 billion more in that one year than Ryan proposes to spend. Senate
Democrats propose to spend $5.7 trillion in 2023, which would be the
highest government spending in one year by any government in world
history, almost double Bush’s $2.983 trillion in 2008. Over the next 10
years, the Senate Democrats propose to spend $46.4 trillion, increasing
annual spending by $10.4 trillion during that time compared to this
year’s already wildly bloated spending.

In fact, the Senate Democrat budget involves zero net non-defense
spending cuts, even from spending increases, let alone from current
spending levels. Senate Democrats propose to cancel the domestic
sequester spending cuts, because they cannot bear even to cut 1% of
government spending even from the increase in spending, and replace
those sequester spending cuts with still another $480 billion tax
increase. They also propose to increase the spending allowed under the
spending caps adopted as part of the 2011 debt ceiling deal. Together,
these proposals would increase domestic spending by close to $1
trillion.

UPDATE:

Senate Democrats also voted unanimously tonight to maintain the $1 trillion
in tax increases in their budget plan which includes raising taxes on the middle class.

They rejected an amendment
offered by Sen. Chuck Grassley, a senior member of the Finance Committee
and the Budget Committee, which would have protected the middle class
and paved the way for pro-growth tax reform.

Grassley said in his speech before the vote, “the Democrat budget taxes the middle class to spend more. It is ‘balanced and fair’ because they finally figured out that you can’t just raise taxes on the wealthy, they gotta raise it on the middle class!”

Video here.