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| FILE - In this March 18, 2013 file photo, House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis. is seen on Capitol Hill in Washington. The Senate pressed ahead Wednesday on a huge, bipartisan spending bill aimed at keeping the government running through September and ruling out the chance of a government shutdown later this month. The developments in the Senate come as the House resumed debate on the budget for next year and beyond. Republicans are pushing a plan that promises sharp cuts to federal health care programs and domestic agency operating budgets as the price for balancing the budget in a decade. |
WASHINGTON
(AP) -- The Republican-controlled House passed a tea party-flavored
budget plan Thursday that promises sharp cuts in safety-net programs for
the poor and a clampdown on domestic agencies, in sharp contrast to
less austere plans favored by President Barack Obama and his Democratic
allies.
The measure, similar to previous plans
offered by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., demonstrates
that it's possible, at least mathematically, to balance the budget
within a decade without raising taxes.
But its
deep cuts to programs for the poor like Medicaid and food stamps and
its promise to abolish so-called "Obamacare" are nonstarters with the
president, who won re-election while campaigning against Ryan's prior
budgets. It passed on a mostly party-line 221-207 vote.
The
House measure advanced as the Democratic Senate debated its first
budget since the 2009 plan that helped Obama pass his health care law.
The
dueling House and Senate budget plans are anchored on opposite ends of
the ideological spectrum in Washington, appealing to core partisans in
the warring parties that are gridlocked over persistent budget deficits.
Obama is exploring the chances of forging a middle path that blends new
taxes and modest curbs to government benefit programs.
"The
president has an opportunity during this critical debate to come
forward and to help make this part of his legacy, like it has become
part of the Clinton legacy: working together on behalf of the American
people to solve what we know is a crisis in our country," said House
Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio. He was referring to President Bill
Clinton's success in working with a GOP Congress to generate budget
surpluses over 1998-2001. "We can't continue to spend money that we
don't have," Boehner said.
The sharp contrast
over the 2014 budget and beyond came as the House cleared away last
year's unfinished budget business - a sweeping, government-wide funding
bill to keep Cabinet agencies running through the 2013 budget year,
which ends Sept. 30.
The House passed the
bipartisan 2013 measure by a sweeping 318-109 vote. The Senate had
approved the measure on Wednesday after easing cuts that threatened
intermittent closures of meat packing plants starting this summer and
reviving college tuition grants for active-duty members of the military.
The cuts were mandated by automatic spending cuts that took effect at
the beginning of the month.
Looking to the
future, Democrats and Republicans staked out divergent positions over
what to do about spiraling federal health care costs and whether to
raise taxes to rein in still-steep government deficits.
The
long-term GOP budget plan authored by Ryan, the party's failed vice
presidential nominee, offers slashing cuts to domestic agencies, the
Medicaid health care plan for the poor and "Obamacare" subsidies while
exempting the Pentagon and Social Security beneficiaries. The measure
proposes shifting programs like Medicaid to the states but is sometimes
scant on details about the very cuts it promises.
The
Ryan measure revives a controversial plan to turn the Medicare programs
for the elderly into a voucher-like system - for future beneficiaries
born in 1959 or later - a program in which the government would
subsidize the purchase of health insurance instead of directly paying
hospital and doctor bills. Critics say the idea would mean
ever-spiraling out-of-pocket costs for care, but Ryan insists the plan
would inject competition into a broken system.
"This
is an uncompromising, ideological approach to our budget issues," said
top Budget Committee Democrat Chris Van Hollen of Maryland. The American
people voted, and they resoundingly rejected the approach that is now
taken, once again, for the third year in a row, in this Republican
budget."
The cuts to domestic agencies like
the FBI, Border Patrol and National Institutes of Health could approach
20 percent when compared with levels agreed to as part of a hard-fought
budget deal from the summer of 2011. That could run the already troubled
appropriations process - it features 12 spending bills that are
supposed to be passed by Congress each year - into the ground.
Fresh
from passing the 2013 wrap-up measure, the Senate was turning to a plan
by new Budget Committee Chairman Patty Murray, D-Wash., that would add
nearly $1 trillion in new taxes over the coming decade in an attempt to
stabilize the $16 trillion-plus national debt. But Murray's plan would
actually increase government spending after the $1.2 trillion cost of
repealing the automatic cuts, called a sequester in Washington-speak.
That means the net cuts to the deficit would amount to just a few
hundred billion dollars in a federal budget estimated at $46 trillion or
so over the coming decade.
"We need to tackle
our deficit and debt fairly and responsibly," Murray said. "We need to
keep the promises we've made as a nation to our seniors, our families
and our communities."
At issue is the arcane
process by which Congress approves a budget. It involves special
legislation, called a budget resolution, that sets nonbinding targets
for taxes and spending but relies on follow-up legislation to go into
effect.
