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United States News Title: Obama outlines his deficit-reduction policy - CALLS NEW TAXES 'SPENDING REDUCTIONS IN TAX CODE' Seeking to reassert leadership on the deficit and reassure troubled financial markets, President Obama on Wednesday said $4 trillion can be cut from accumulated deficits by 2023, and told Congress to pass a “debt failsafe” trigger that would impose big cuts if the debt doesn’t begin to stabilize within three years. Essentially tossing aside the budget he submitted just two months ago, Mr. Obama called for much deeper defense and domestic spending cuts and said while he will not trim benefit payment from Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid, more money can be squeezed out of the latter two programs in other ways. The president also called for undoing the Bush tax cuts for upper-income taxpayers, and for canceling other tax cuts many of them receive such as the mortgage interest deduction — which he called “spending reductions in the tax code.” Mr. Obama’s comments, made in a speech on deficit reduction, marked a clear attempt by the White House to reclaim momentum in a spending debate that has gripped Washington in recent months as concerns over the nation’s long-term fiscal h ealth have both parties sounding the alarm over a $14 trillion federal debt. “Ultimately, all this rising debt will cost us jobs and damage our economy,” Mr. Obama said. “We won’t be able to afford good schools, new research or the repair of roads — all the things that create new jobs and businesses here in America. Businesses will be less likely to invest and open up shop in a country that seems unwilling or unable to balance its books. And if our creditors start worrying that we may be unable to pay back our debts, that could drive up interest rates for everyone who borrows money — making it harder for businesses to expand and hire, or families to take out a mortgage.” The speech amounted to more of a framework than a detailed plan, but the president did call for reductions in most areas of government spending — sparing only Social Security. Specifically, Mr. Obama said he will try to squeeze an extra $360 billion by 2023 from automatic spending programs, which are based on formulas and not renewed by Congress each year; seek to grab an additional $480 billion from Medicare; cut defense spending by $400 billion versus projected levels, and another $200 billion in regular domestic spending. In many of those cases, he said he is just setting parameters and expects others to suggest or actually make the cuts. In Medicare, for example, he said the new payments board set up in last year’s health care law will clamp down tighter on cost increases, while he said he will have his defense secretary figure out where military funding can be cut. Republicans on Capitol Hill ruled the president’s tax increases out altogether. “Any plan that starts with job-destroying tax hikes is a non-starter,” said House Speaker John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican. “We need to grow our economy – not our government – by creating a better environment for private sector job growth.” Mr. Boehner said House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s own 2012 budget, which would cut $6 trillion over the next decade, has “set the bar” in terms of serious proposals to tackle the nation’s fiscal woes. Mr. Obama’s remarks come two months after the president sent a 2012 budget outline to Capitol Hill that was widely panned by both parties for failing to tackle the big deficit-driving programs such as entitlements and for using so-called gimmicks that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office rejected. Meanwhile, the House later this week will vote on Mr. Ryan’s budget, which calls for an overhaul of entitlement programs. His plan would convert Medicaid, the federal-state health program for the poor, into a block grant to states, and would change Medicare so that instead of paying for care, it would pay seniors a certain amount and let them shop for the best health care plan themselves. With Mr. Ryan sitting in the front row at Wednesday’s speech, Mr. Obama repeatedly attacked the plan, saying it wasn’t “serious” or “courageous.” “There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires,” he said. The speech also comes several months after a bipartisan panel Mr. Obama himself created came up with a deficit-slashing proposal that failed to garner enough votes for congressional consideration. At the time, Mr. Obama kept his distance from that plan, which would have trimmed $4 trillion off the federal tab over the next decade. The bipartisan co-chairmen of the 18-member panel, former White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles and former Sen. Alan Simpson, later said Mr. Obama’s February budget proposal went “nowhere close” to addressing the nation’s long-term fiscal challenges. The two men were nevertheless on hand Wednesday for Mr. Obama’s speech to students at the George Washington University. Even as Mr. Obama and congressional leaders finalize a hotly debated deal to avoid a government shutdown by cutting some $38 billion in government spending, an even larger fight looms in the next several weeks over an increase in the nation’s debt ceiling. The U.S. is expected to eclipse its $14.25 trillion borrowing limit sometime next month, and the administration has warned that failing to increase the limit would cause the country to default on its obligations and ruin its credit rating.
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#2. To: We The People (#0)
this is a far better, far more realistic plan than the idiocy Ryan unveiled last week. Krugman on the health care reforms:
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