Teabagging Their Base

[Havakasha]

Teabagging their base: House GOP budget plan cuts deficit by just 2%
by Jed Lewison
Thu Feb 03, 2011 at 10:24:03 AM PST

They huffed and they puffed, they promised their teahadist base they'd usher in an era of austerity, yet this is the best House Republicans could do:

Politico has the details:

GOP scales back budget cut goals

Updating their budget estimates, House Republicans conceded Thursday that their best hope is to cut current appropriations by $32 billion for the remainder of this fiscal year, once new spending for defense and other security needs are added to the equation.

The impact on domestic spending and foreign aid programs would still be very severe, with the GOP seeking an immediate $58 billion cut from President Barack Obama’s once expansive 2011 budget. But with the Congressional Budget Office predicting a nearly $1.5 trillion deficit for the current year, the scaled-back estimates reflect the limits of a budget strategy so focused narrowly on one segment of appropriations.

As outlined by leadership and House Budget Committee staff, the new cap on appropriations will set a 2011 ceiling of $1.055 trillion—$32 billion less than the latest estimate by CBO of the full-year of the stop gap spending bill due to expire Mar. 4.

To put this into perspective, after spending the last two years claiming that Barack Obama was destroying America by adding to our national debt, now that the GOP is in power, they've proposed a budget which would decrease the federal budget deficit by just 2%. I guess they must be socialists too.

[Havakasha]

Updating their budget estimates, House Republicans conceded Thursday that their best hope is to cut current appropriations by $32 billion for the remainder of this fiscal year, once new spending for defense and other security needs are added to the equation.

The impact on domestic spending and foreign aid programs would still be very severe, with the GOP seeking an immediate $58 billion cut from President Barack Obama’s once expansive 2011 budget. But with the Congressional Budget Office predicting a nearly $1.5 trillion deficit for the current year, the scaled-back estimates reflect the limits of a budget strategy so focused narrowly on one segment of appropriations.
As outlined by leadership and House Budget Committee staff, the new cap on appropriations will set a 2011 ceiling of $1.055 trillion—$32 billion less than the latest estimate by CBO of the full-year of the stop gap spending bill due to expire Mar. 4.

Most simply, domestic and foreign aid programs would be cut to $420 billion or about $40 billion below the levels now. But an additional $8 billion would be added for defense and security needs, even after making reductions from Obama’s Pentagon request.

Beginning next week, the House Appropriations Committee will use these numbers to begin writing its own continuing resolution to cover the last seven months of the fiscal year ending Sept. 30. And the long term goal is still one of rolling back domestic spending to the fiscal 2008 levels set by the Bush Administration in its last year in office.

But getting there is proving more of an ordeal than the leadership had once hoped, and some further extension of the March 4th deadline is likely to be needed before any agreement is reached with the Democratic-controlled Senate or the White House.

The more immediate problem facing Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) could be in his own conference, and Republicans find themselves caught in a rhetorical trap going back to their famous pledge to cut $100 billion from spending in their first



Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories...#ixzz1CvPIh8t5