Republicans Introduce Budget Cutting $4.4 Trillion Over Next 10 Years, $6.2 Billion From Obama’s Budget
Democrats, in an effort to make their proposed budget cuts look serious, have been using President Obama’s proposed budget (which has obviously never been made law) as their baseline for totaling up cuts. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Rep. Paul Ryan uses Obama’s budget as his baseline as well, and by that measure the budget Republicans have just introduced for 2012 will $6.2 trillion over the next 10 years.
Per the CBO, calculating from current spending, the cuts will total $4.4 trillion. At a time when the federal government is spending as much as eight times what it takes in revenues every month, the cuts come like a breath of fresh air.
The president’s recent budget proposal would accelerate America’s descent into a debt crisis. It doubles debt held by the public by the end of his first term and triples it by 2021. It imposes $1.5 trillion in new taxes, with spending that never falls below 23% of the economy. His budget permanently enlarges the size of government. It offers no reforms to save government health and retirement programs, and no leadership.
Our budget, which we call The Path to Prosperity, is very different. For starters, it cuts $6.2 trillion in spending from the president’s budget over the next 10 years, reduces the debt as a percentage of the economy, and puts the nation on a path to actually pay off our national debt. Our proposal brings federal spending to below 20% of gross domestic product (GDP), consistent with the postwar average, and reduces deficits by $4.4 trillion.
A study just released by the Heritage Center for Data Analysis projects that The Path to Prosperity will help create nearly one million new private-sector jobs next year, bring the unemployment rate down to 4% by 2015, and result in 2.5 million additional private-sector jobs in the last year of the decade. It spurs economic growth, with $1.5 trillion in additional real GDP over the decade. According to Heritage’s analysis, it would result in $1.1 trillion in higher wages and an average of $1,000 in additional family income each year…
This budget would focus on growth by reforming the nation’s outdated tax code, consolidating brackets, lowering tax rates, and assuming top individual and corporate rates of 25%. It maintains a revenue-neutral approach by clearing out a burdensome tangle of deductions and loopholes that distort economic activity and leave some corporations paying no income taxes at all.
This is “the first concerted, credible effort to shrink the federal government since the birth of the welfare state seven decades ago,” says Peter Robinson, and Republicans are going to have the leverage to put behind this budget.
Setting aside the on-going debate over the FY2011 budget (where Republicans are readying yet another continuing resolution as discussions with Democrats break down) the Treasury Department announced today that the country will hit the national debt ceiling on May 16th, with an absolute drop-dead date of July 8th.
In other words, Democrats have their backs against the wall. And with the public saying the national debt is their primary concern, Republicans have the wind at their backs.
The wild card is whether or not Democrats and their apologists in the media can be effective with their usual strategy of casting spending cuts as mean-spirited attacks on the disadvantaged and vulnerable by a bunch of plutocrats funded by billionaires, etc., etc. The word “radical” is already being tossed around, but we have to ask ourselves what’s more radical, spending trillions of dollars we don’t have ever year or cutting trillions of dollars of spending we can’t afford?
Normally this tact works well for the left, but these are strange political times. And liberal gatekeepers in the mainstream media don’t necessarily control the narrative any more.
One thing is certain, expect things to get very nasty very quickly.
Tags: deficits, national debt, paul ryan
