Editorials Reject House GOP 'Work Harder for Less' Budget
New York Times – The House Budget Disaster
If the budget resolution released on Tuesday by House Republicans is a road map to a "Stronger America," as its title proclaims, it's hard to imagine what the path to a diminished America would look like.
The plan's deep cuts land squarely on the people who most need help: the poor and the working class. The plan also would turn Medicare into a system of unspecified subsidies to buy private insurance by the time Americans who are now 56 years old become eligible. And it would strip 16.4 million people of health insurance by repealing the Affordable Care Act (the umpteenth attempt by Republicans to do so since the law was enacted in 2010).
House Republicans would increase defense financing by bolstering a contingency fund that is not subject to existing budget caps, while insisting on adherence to caps or even deeper cuts to nondefense spending on education, the environment, law enforcement, medical research and other so-called discretionary programs
And even if cutting the budget were urgent — which it is not — the House Republican plan ignores the most sensible, equitable cuts.
House Republicans are sticking to their tired themes of spending cuts, no matter the need or consequences, and tax cuts above all.
Washington Post – The GOP's fiscal phonies
…the majority-Republican House has produced a budget blueprint that serves no particular purpose except to demonstrate the inadequacy of pure, no-tax-increases GOP policy doctrine. To be sure, the document calls for an essentially balanced budget by 2025, which would reduce debt held by the public to 55 percent of GDP. It achieves this, however, entirely by cutting scheduled spending by $5.5 trillion, the largest chunk of which would be a $2 trillion 10-year savings from repealing the Affordable Care Act — which is neither sensible nor politically feasible.
Another $900 billion would come from converting Medicaid to a block grant program administered by the states, which also isn't going to happen under a Democratic president, if ever.
Given the enormous cuts this would imply to the courts, parks, FBI, water projects and a host of other useful and — even in red states — popular programs, the GOP approach wouldn't be desirable even if it were politically possible. In fact, Republicans themselves are deeply divided over how to prevent further cuts to defense spending under the sequester law, to the point where the budget plan's GOP authors resorted to a gimmick…
The fatal flaw in their plan, however, is its assumption that the U.S. government already collects the optimum amount of taxes given its foreseeable responsibilities.
That is not only a financial and political mistake but also a moral one, given that the only alternative is to balance the budget through sacrifices in the domestic budget, including programs for those who need help the most.
Baltimore Sun Editorial – Ryan budget redux
The budget template unveiled by House Republican leaders…reads exactly like the Paul Ryan budgets that the party has been pledging fealty to for the last four years. Mr. Ryan's name is no longer on it — he's moved from chairing the Appropriations Committee to chairing Ways and Means — but it's a reflection of the same Ayn Randian philosophy that the surest way for the government to help people is for the government to stop trying to help people. Or do much of anything else.
It partially privatizes Medicare, turns Medicaid into block grants for the states — a long-term recipe for an increase in the number of uninsured — and, for good measure, repeals the Affordable Care Act. Again.
If those who are trying to lead the party nationally are concerned about growing inequality in American society, those running the House of Representatives are assuredly not….Meanwhile, it belies efforts to provide better opportunities for the economically disadvantaged by underinvesting in education…