House GOP unveils budget blueprint. WASHINGTON (AP) — Conservative House Republicans on Tuesday set up what appears to be a potential re-run of last year's turbulent domestic policy fight with President Barack Obama, putting forward an election-year budget manifesto that would blend steep social program cuts with reduced tax rates.
The GOP plan released by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan would, if enacted into law, wrestle the deficit to a manageable size in short order, but only by cutting Medicaid, food stamps, Pell Grants and a host of other programs that Obama has promised to protect. To deal with the influx of retiring Baby Boomers, the GOP budget reprises a controversial approach to overhauling Medicare that would switch the program — for those under 55 today — from a traditional "fee for service" framework in which the government pays doctor and hospital bills to a voucherlike "premium support" approach in which the government subsidizes purchases of health insurance.
President Barack ObamaMedicare. No, Paul Ryan Does Not Want To Strengthen The Safety Net. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin chairs the House Budget Committee and is also a follower of the philosophy of Ayn Rand.
As he put it, " I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand" which is why he requires staffers to read Atlas Shrugged. Normally we don't think of Republican members of congress as super-concerned with the poor, and we especially don't think of Republican members of congress who are also committed Randians to be super-concerned with the poor.
And, indeed, Ryan's priorities as revealed in both last year's version of his budget proposal and this year's new one are to keep taxes low and military spending high. Obviously to do that you need to ax programs aimed at benefitting poor people. But one of Ryan's oddest ticks is that along with a passion for reducing spending on programs that benefit poor people and a passion for programs that benefit Ayn Rand, he loves to talk about his devotion to the safety net! Paul Ryan’s budget: Should the poor pay for deficit reduction? Here’s the basic outline of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s 2013 budget in one sentence: Ryan’s budget funds trillions of dollars in tax cuts, defense spending and deficit reduction by cutting deeply into health-care programs and income supports for the poor.
(Chip Somodevilla - Getty Images) At the end of his initial release, Ryan posts a table comparing his budget to the president’s budget. The single largest difference is in the tax section: Ryan raises $2 trillion less in revenue than the White House does. In the president’s budget, those revenues come mostly from increasing taxes on the wealthy. So that’s the first big gap between the two proposals: Under Ryan’s budget, revenue would be lower, and the distribution of taxes more regressive, than under Obama’s budget. On the spending side, Ryan’s biggest cuts come from health-care programs. Wonkbook: 4 questions about Paul Ryan's budget. At 10 a.m., Rep.
Paul Ryan will unveil the latest version of the House GOP budget. Expect an ambitious tax-reform plan, a Medicare section that looks more like Ryan-Wyden than like Ryan's previous bid, a roadmap to undoing the defense cuts in the sequester, and lots and lots of graphs. In a Feb. 16 file photo House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., holds up a copy of President Barack Obama's fiscal 2013 federal budget on Capitol Hill in Washington. (Carolyn Kaster - AP) Can you tell that I'm excited? But the real question is how the new pieces fit together, and what they do to the overall deficit fiscal responsibility of the plan. 1) Ryan's original plan avoided raising taxes by implausibly promising to hold spending growth in Medicare and Medicaid to inflation. 2) Ryan's budget includes an ambitious tax reform proposal that takes the tax code down to two rates: 10% and 25%.