Ryan Gets 62 Percent of His Huge Budget Cuts from Programs for Lower-Income Americans
This may have been posted at some time in the past, but I figured it bears repeating...
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3723
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget plan would get at least 62 percent of its $5.3 trillion in nondefense budget cuts over ten years (relative to a continuation of current policies) from programs that serve people of limited means. This stands a core principle of President Obama’s fiscal commission on its head and violates basic principles of fairness.
Not much has changed on this front from Chairman Ryan’s fiscal year 2012 budget plan released a year ago. Then, too, Chairman Ryan proposed massive spending cuts, the bulk of which were in programs that serve low- and moderate-income Americans. (Compared with last year’s plan, the cuts in low-income programs are larger in dollar terms but slightly smaller as a shareof the total cuts; see box.)
The plan of Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, who co-chaired President Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, established, as a basic principle, that deficit reduction should not increase poverty or widen inequality. The Ryan plan charts a different course, turning its biggest cannons on low- and moderate-income people.
Chairman Ryan’s budget proposes $5.3 trillion in nondefense budget cuts (and about $200 billion in defense increases). The $5.3 trillion in cuts includes $1.2 trillion in cuts to nondefense discretionary programs; this $1.2 trillion in cuts is beyond the cuts needed to comply with the strict funding caps that the Budget Control Act established. Several hundred billion dollars of these additional cuts would very likely come from low-income programs.
<more>
= new reply since forum marked as read
