Lifted from reader rjs’s newsletter when comparing the Ryan outline and the Dem budget issues to be resolved:
but this year, like each of the past three, that budget responsibility was again shirked, leaving us with government by “continuing resolution” which has resulted in as many as seven such short term funding bills in one year…so now this newly formed House-Senate conference committee will attempt to come up with a plan that will set a new long term template to replaced the 10 years of mandated sequestered spending cuts that kicked in when a similar committee failed to produce a compromise in November of 2011… leading the negotiations for the House Republicans will be Paul Ryan, who will start negotiations with his much panned “Ryan plan”, which of course rolls back Obamacare, changes medicare to a voucher program, so seniors would buy health care on the private market, converts Medicaid and the food stamp program into block grants to the states, and also includes other cuts to non-defense spending…presenting the Democrat team’s plan will be Patty Murray, whose proposed long term budget includes $100 billion in infrastructure spending offset by what is effectively $1 trillion in new tax revenues resulting from the elimination of a batch of tax deductions, and nearly $1 trillion in spending cuts including $275 billion to heath and $240 billion to defense…our graphic to the right above, which originated with the Washington Post, shows the differences between the two plans in trillions of dollars of budget cuts over 10 years….the schematic bar for the Democrat budget is on the left and it includes $975 billion in increased taxes, $975 billion in spending cuts, slightly offset by the $100 billion in infrastructure spending…the schematic for the Republican Ryan plan is on the right and it shows $4.6 trillion dollars in spending cuts spread out over 10 years…the conference committee has less than two months to merge those plans into one, such that both bars would have to become one and the same, however they compromised…and if they don’t come up with such a compromise, then we’re again stuck with the default, the second round of across the board sequestered spending cuts as specified by the Budget Control Act of 2011…
