Re: Obama, in Talk, Calls House G.O.P. Budget the Work of Rightist Radicals

Political Drama .... bread and circuses ...

Neither Party's budget will cut anything.

Regard$,
--MJ

"The USA: like Russia, but with slightly better public relations." -- Scott Horton



At 09:34 AM 4/4/2012, you wrote:

Obama, in Talk,
Calls House G.O.P. Budget
the Work of Rightist Radicals

Speaking in Washington on Tuesday,
President Obama criticized Republicans, the latest in a string of
combative speeches.

By MARK LANDLER
NYTimes Published: April 3, 2012
WASHINGTON — President Obama opened a full-frontal assault on Tuesday
on the federal budget adopted by House Republicans, condemning it as a
"Trojan horse" that would greatly deepen inequality in the United
States, and painting it as the manifesto of a party that has swung
radically to the right.

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  a.. Obama's Remarks to Newspaper Editors (April 4, 2012)
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Warning against what he said would be severe cuts to college
scholarships, medical research, national parks, and even technology to
make accurate weather forecasts, Mr. Obama said the Republican budget
was "so far to the right, it makes the Contract With America" — Newt
Gingrich's legislative manifesto of 1994 — "look like the New Deal."
Mr. Obama's scathing attack, in a speech to a meeting of editors and
reporters, was part of a broad indictment of the Republican Party that
included the president's likely opponent in the fall, Mitt Romney.

The House budget, and the philosophy it represents, Mr. Obama said, is
"antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and
upward mobility for everyone who's willing to work for it — a place
where prosperity doesn't trickle down from the top, but grows outward
from the heart of the middle class."

Republicans fired back quickly at the president, with the House
speaker, John A. Boehner, accusing him of lobbing "partisan potshots"
at Republicans rather than responding to their budget plan with a
responsible counteroffer. A spokesman for the House Budget Committee,
Conor Sweeney, said Mr. Obama's assertions about the cuts in the
budget "are simply false."

For Mr. Obama, it was the latest in a string of combative speeches, in
which he has sought to make House Republicans a proxy for the
Republican Party and cast himself as a brake on their radical agenda.

"I can't remember a moment when the choice between competing visions
of our future has been so unambiguously clear," Mr. Obama said.

Americans, he said, cannot afford to elect a Republican president at a
time of fragile economic recovery, with a weak job market and a
crushing debt from "two wars, two massive tax cuts and an
unprecedented financial crisis." The widening gulf between the rich
and everyone else, Mr. Obama said, was hobbling the country's economic
growth. He cited studies that found that societies with less income
inequality had stronger and steadier growth.

"In this country, broad-based prosperity has never trickled down from
the success of a wealthy few," the president said. "It has always come
from the success of a strong and growing middle class. That's how a
generation who went to college on the G.I. Bill, including my
grandfather, helped build the most prosperous economy the world has
ever known."

Mr. Obama's themes echoed his State of the Union address in January
and his speech in Osawatomie, Kan., in December, when he invoked a
Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, who he said combined a
fervent belief in the free market with a resolve to protect those
vulnerable to its excesses.

But the president turned a harsh new spotlight on the 2013 budget,
drafted by Representative Paul D. Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican who
chairs the Budget Committee. The proposal, he said, calls for
across-the-board cuts in discretionary spending, as well as tax cuts,
which he said would disproportionately benefit households earning more
than $250,000 and would cost $4.6 trillion over the next decade.

"Disguised as deficit reduction plans, it is really an attempt to
impose a radical vision on our country. It is thinly veiled social
Darwinism," Mr. Obama said. "And by gutting the very things we need to
grow an economy that's built to last — education and training,
research and development, our infrastructure — it's a prescription for
decline."

Singling out Medicare, the president asserted that the Republican plan
to shift people to a system of vouchers would drive up the cost of
health care for the elderly, since private insurance companies would
target the youngest and healthiest people and leave the rest to rely
on Medicare.

For millionaires, the president said, the average annual benefit of
the tax cuts would be $150,000 — money that he said could be used to
pay for computer labs in schools, salaries for police officers and
firefighters, medical care for veterans and a year's worth of
prescription drugs for older people.

The White House's calculation for the tax benefit is straightforward,
but Republicans on the House Budget Committee say it is wrong. The
average household earning more than $1 million would gain $46,000 from
the House budget's repeal of the Medicare hospital insurance tax that
was part of the health care law, the Republicans said, and $105,000
from the extension of the Bush-era tax cuts that Mr. Obama wants to
see expire next year.

But the shape of the tax code is left largely unknown by the budget.
The blueprint calls for the six existing income tax rates collapsed
into just two, 25 percent and 10 percent. The revenue loss would have
to be made up by the repeal of unspecified tax credits and deductions.
It would be up to the House Ways and Means Committee to determine how
that would be done.

In theory, tax writers could focus on tax breaks that primarily help
the rich, like the deduction for charitable giving, or end the biggest
tax breaks only for upper income earners. But Democrats say such
selective changes to the tax code would never recoup such large cuts
to income tax rates.

Jonathan Weisman contributed reporting.


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