The White House has released President Joe Biden's fiscal year 2024 budget, a $6.8 trillion proposal that aims to increase taxes on the wealthiest Americans and cut deficits by nearly $3 trillion over the next decade.

President Biden traveled to Pennsylvania on Thursday to unveil his proposal in a campaign-style speech, offering both a roadmap for his political priorities for the year ahead and an opening salvo in his high-stakes battle with House Republicans over increasing the country's borrowing power.

In a statement accompanying his budget, President Biden hailed his administration's economic achievements – including the recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, as well as cutting the deficit $1.7 trillion in his first two years in office – while acknowledging that there is more work to be done, and this budget is his plan to accomplish his lofty goals.

"Now, it is time to finish the job, building on the ambitious progress we have made with new investments in America’s future," Biden said. "My 2024 Budget is a blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America in a fiscally responsible way that leaves no one behind."

The budget includes $842 billion in defense spending, as well as $6 billion in aid for Ukraine, nearly $25 billion to boost border security and $5 billion for election security. It also contains several domestic spending proposals, including the restoration of the Child Tax Credit, 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave, an expansion of free community college and plans to curb increases to prescription drug prices and a $35 monthly cap on insulin.

"It will boost American manufacturing, provide national paid leave, cut taxes for working families, make our communities safer, drive medical breakthroughs, deliver for our veterans and a whole lot more," said Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young. "That’s the right way to continue growing our economy."

Those domestic proposals would be paid for, the White House said, with a new 25% tax on billionaires and a reversal of the 2017 tax cuts enacted by then-President Donald Trump on Americans making more than $400,000 per year. It would also raise the corporate tax rate to 28% from 21%. The measure also aims to reduce federal deficits by nearly $3 trillion over the next decade.

The budget would seek to close the “carried interest” loophole that allows wealthy hedge fund managers and others to pay their taxes at a lower rate, and prevent billionaires from being able to set aside large amounts of their holdings in tax-favored retirement accounts, according to an administration official. The plan also projects saving $24 billion over 10 years by removing a tax subsidy for cryptocurrency transactions.

The Biden administration has spent the better part of the last week slowly unveiling portions of the president's plan. Biden earlier this week unveiled his proposal to keep Medicare financially solvent for the next quarter of a century by raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans.

While the president's budget proposal has little chance of passage – Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., predicted it "will not see the light of day" – the package of tax hikes on the wealthiest Americans and corporations, as well as major investments in paid leave, climate, education and manufcaturing, will serve as a policy proposal heading into the 2024 elections.

After all, Biden is delivering the speech in Pennsylvania, a crucial battleground state that helped deliver him the White House in 2020 and increased Democrats' Senate majority in last year's midterms.

"We see this as a value statement,” White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said Wednesday. “This is something that shows the American people that we take this very seriously when we think about the fiscal responsibility, when we think about how do we move forward."

It will also serve as a means of highlighting the disparity between Biden's plans and those put forth by Congressional Republicans. So far, Republicans have not yet offered a counter-proposal regarding an increase to the debt ceiling.

"There’s a vision here and there’s a contrast," Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young told CNN. "You can be fiscally responsible and invest in the American people, or you can pull the rug out from people by going after programs that people absolutely need."

In a statement, House Republican leaders slammed the proposal, calling it "reckless."

"We must cut wasteful government spending," wrote House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., and Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., in a joint statement. "Our debt is one of the greatest threats to America and the time to address this crisis is now. Yet, President Biden is proposing out of control spending and delaying debt negotiations, following his pattern of shrugging and ignoring when faced with a crisis."

Biden's fellow Democrats, on the other hand, cheered his proposal.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called Biden's budget "a bold, optimistic, and serious proposal for strengthening our economy and creating opportunities to climb into the middle class, and help people stay there."

The president's budget comes amid a somewhat uneasy time for the U.S. economy. While unemployment has remained low, Americans are still grappling with inflation and time is running out for lawmakers to come together on an agreement to increase the debt ceiling. 

The country reached the $31.4 trillion debt limit in January. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that her department has employed "extraordinary measures" in order to allow the country to continue paying its bills. Experts appear split on how long those measures will last. The Bipartisan Policy Center predicted the U.S. could face default as soon as early June, while the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates those measures will expire at some point between July and September.

President Biden has insisted that lawmakers lift the debt ceiling without conditions, but Speaker McCarthy and his newly empowered Republican House majority are calling for spending cuts in order to increase the country's borrowing power.

In an interview with Spectrum News earlier this week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., expressed confidence that the United States will avert a first-ever default on its obligations.

"Everybody knows from the beginning you're not going to default," McConnell said in an interview with Spectrum News on Tuesday. "It's simply unacceptable, it's not going to happen. The Speaker said that as well."

In testimony to the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday, Mark Zandi, Chief Economist of Moody’s Analytics, warned that a default would be "catastrophic" for the economy – with even a brief default potentially resulting in a million jobs lost and a "mild" recession. 

"A default would be a catastrophic blow to the already fragile economy," Zandi said. "Global financial markets and the economy would be upended, and even if resolved quickly, Americans would likely pay for this default for generations, as global investors would rightly believe that the federal government’s finances have been politicized and that a time may come when they would not be paid what they are owed when owed it."

The Associated Press contributed to this report