DAILY BEAST / AP: House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price, R-Ga., and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., plan to produce blueprints that would balance the budget within 10 years – without raising taxes.
Instead, they will propose major spending cuts to programs such as Medicare, health care subsidies, food stamps and the Medicaid program for the poor and elderly to produce a budget that’s balanced. Such cuts, if actually implemented later, would likely slash spending by $5 trillion or so over the coming decade from budgets that are presently on track to spend almost $50 trillion over that timeframe.
To the dismay of defense hawks, however, they can’t really use Congress’ arcane budget process to repeal automatic Pentagon cuts that will strip $54 billion from core Pentagon programs based on limits set under a hard-fought 2011 budget deal. Nor can they match Obama’s proposal to add $38 billion to the Pentagon’s budget next year without exposing the entire budget to a parliamentary challenge by Democrats… (more)
