On Tuesday, the President gave a speech in which he contrasted his vision for our economy – one where everyone pays their fair share and everyone plays by the same set of rules – with the Republican approach of giving massive tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires paid for by cuts to programs that the middle class and seniors depend on.
Congressman Ryan and his staff has since taken issue with some of the critiques the President made about the Republican approach. We believe in backing up our facts – so here’s some further explanation of some of the core problems with the Ryan Republican Budget.
1. The Republican budget enacts a drastic, unspecified 19 percent cut in non-defense discretionary programs that help the middle class and help our economy grow.
The House Budget resolution includes a $1.060 trillion cut in non-defense discretionary spending, below the levels to which both Democrats and Republicans agreed in the Budget Control Act. We did the math, and a $1.060 trillion cut to discretionary programs – as called for in the Republican budget – would amount to a 19 percent cut in non-defense discretionary spending. By comparison, the cuts proposed in the House Budget resolution would be three times as great as the cuts required by the sequester and because of the lack of detail in the resolution, we are left to assume that they would be applied in the same arbitrary, across the board, manner. The President carefully described the impact of those cuts if they were distributed across the board, and noted that protecting some places would require even deeper cuts in other places.
House Budget Committee Chairman Ryan’s office responded that considering the cut across-the-board wasn’t fair because “the House Budget Committee made dozens of specific assumptions to justify our numbers, and we made these assumptions public in the hundreds of pages of text we posted in plain view on the House Budget Committee’s website.” But if you look at the report, it only includes a list of “illustrative policy options.” But they’re just that—as you can see on page 30 of that same PDF: “this report offers a range of policy options to help demonstrate how the budget’s fiscal goals could be achieved. These options are illustrative….” So it’s not as though the House is taking ownership of these proposals—as President Obama has owned his specific ideas in each of his budgets.
Fonte: White House