Obama's Budget Speech

From Congressman Paul Ryan's office on Obama's budget speech: 

• Counts unspecified savings over 12 years, not the 10-year window by which serious budget proposals are evaluated.
• Postpones all savings until 2013 – after his reelection campaign.
• Runs away from the Fiscal Commission’s recommendations on Social Security – puts forward no specific ideas or even a process to force action.
• Calls for the appointment of another commission, after mostly omitting from his Fiscal Year 2012 Budget any of proposals submitted by the commission he appointed last year.
• Non-specific framework fails to meet his Fiscal Commission's own deficit-reduction goals.
• Taxes:
• Proposes to raise taxes on the American people by more than $1 trillion, devastating our fragile economy and stifling job creation.
• Endorsed the Fiscal Commission’s ideas on taxes, which specifically called for lower tax rates and a broader base, but then called for higher tax rates. Which is it?
• Government health and retirement programs are growing at more than twice the speed of the economy. At the current rate of spending, revenue would have to rise “by more than 50 percent” just to keep debt at its current level, according to the Government Accountability Office. That means tax increases across-the-board, now and in the future. 
• Medicare:
• Instead of proposing structural reforms that would actually reduce health care costs, the President proposed across-the-board cuts to current seniors’ care.
• Strictly limits the amount of health care seniors can receive within the existing structure of unsustainable government health care programs.
• Gives more power to unelected bureaucrats in Washington to determine what treatments seniors should or shouldn’t get, against a backdrop of costs that continue to rise.
• Conceded that the relentlessly rising cost of health care is the primary reason why the nation is threatened by debt, and implicitly conceded that his health care law failed to solve the problem.
• Eviscerates the only competitive element anywhere in health-care entitlement programs – the competition amongst Part D prescription-drug plans – which allowed the drug benefit to come in 41 percent under budget.
• Medicaid:
• Acknowledges that the open-ended financing of Medicaid is a crippling financial burden to both states and the federal government, but explicitly rejected the only solution to this problem, which is to give states the freedom they need to design systems that work for the unique needs of their own populations.
• Defense:
• Proposes more cuts on top of $78 billion in cuts included in his own defense budget, which he proposed just two months ago – all at a time when he continues to task the military with new missions.
• Secretary Gates has said that the military needs 2 percent – 3 percent real growth just to keep executing the missions that DOD has already been assigned.
• Secretary Gates described deficit reduction plans that let budget targets drive defense policy as “math, not strategy.”