When Spending Cuts Get Real

Rep. Paul Ryan comes up short on specifics for spending cuts
Perhaps one of the reasons the House Republicans are reneging on their Spending Cut pledge is because, well, they don't have a clue what they're doing. Here's wunderkind Paul Ryan, unable to come up with one specific cut. MEREDITH VIERA (HOST): You say Discretionary Spending — give me specifics. Where are you going to cut? Are you gonna cut transportation, education, Medicare — what are you going to cut? RYAN: That is what is gonna happen in the appropriations process down the road....

Fraud
On his show yesterday, Hugh Hewitt interviewed Paul Ryan about his plans during the next Congress: HH: In terms of the staff that you’ve got coming to Budget committee, out of the culture of Washington, they’re all kind of suspect. Where are you finding the people who are going to have sort of the immunity to the spending disease? PR: Well, I just hired somebody from the National Review. He knows his audience. But you don't need someone from NR to cut spending. We all know how to cut t...

Will Obamacare cut our federal deficit?
The short answer is this: no government program reduces the Deficit. The only action a government can take to reduce the deficit is to cut spending or raise taxes - and often as not, raising taxes just opens the door for new spending. What the Affordable Care Act does is reduce some spending, while creating a whole bunch of new, untried subsidies for the Middle Class. But interestingly enough, the mainstream press has simply taken for granted the ‘fact’ that ObamaCare reduces Deficit...

Watch Paul Ryan Live
Get alerts when there is a new article that might interest you. Paul Ryan will soon sit down for a conversation with Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot. e21 and the Manhattan Institute are sponsoring the event, which will be at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. from 12-1 p.m. Bill Kristol will be introducing Ryan and Gigot. You can watch live on C-SPAN3 or online, here. The new Republican majority in the House has promised to reign in the federal Budget by cutting spe...

Rep. Paul Ryan: Republicans Are Not Backing Out Of Spending Cuts Pledge
This is something Rep. Paul Ryan confirms to National Review, saying “We are halfway through the Fiscal Year now, a continuing resolution occurred and so the score of that policy is not $100 billion anymore, it’s something lower than that.” By passing a continuing resolution in the Lame Duck session of Congress (as opposed to the $1.1 Trillion, porked-up omnibus spending bill Democrats wanted) Republicans locked in current levels of spending until a new Budget can be passed. Ry...

Vieira to Paul Ryan: It Feels Like the GOP is Out For 'Revenge'
NBC's Meredith Vieira wasted no time in jumping down Paul Ryan's throat, on Wednesday's Today show, as she said it appeared the Republican Party did not care as much about creating jobs, since they seemed to be more focused on repealing ObamaCare, which the Today co-anchor characterized as "an act of revenge." For his part the Wisconsin Republican Congressman responded that repealing Obamacare law had everything to do with creating jobs since, as he educated Vieira, "T...

No Surprise, Republicans to Break Promise on Spending Cuts
Republican leaders are scaling back that number by as much as half, aides say, because the current Fiscal Year, which began Oct. 1, will be nearly half over before Spending Cuts could become law. While House Republicans were never expected to succeed in enacting cuts of that scale, given opposition in the Senate from the Democratic majority and some Republicans, and from President Obama, a House vote would put potentially vulnerable Republican lawmakers on record supporting deep reductions of up...

Ryan: We'll Hold Hearings on Medicare Reform
Get alerts when there is a new article that might interest you. Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan said this afternoon at the National Press Club that his committee and others will hold “lots of hearings” on Medicare and Medicaid reform during the next two years, even though he's not sure there's consensus in the Republican party to bring up Legislation for a vote. Said Ryan: "We’re gonna bring governors up to tell us about their reforms that they’ve done. We’re go...

Paul Ryan: Actually, Obamacare Will Increase Budget Deficit by $700 Billion Over 10 Years
Get alerts when there is a new article that might interest you. Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan said this afternoon that contrary to claims that ObamaCare will reduce the Deficit, it will actually increase the deficit by roughly $700 billion dollars. Ryan said this afternoon at the National Press Club that the only reason a Congressional Budget Office letter claims the national Health Care law will reduce the deficit--i.e. bring in more revenue through tax hikes and Medicare cuts than it sp...

Boehner challenges new CBO estimate that repealing Obamacare will raise deficit
The Congressional Budget Office has just sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner saying that repealing ObamaCare would "probably increase federal budget Deficits over the 2012-2019 period by a total of roughly $145 billion." The CBO's reasoning is basically this: If ObamaCare is repealed, the government will not collect X in taxes, as provided for in the national Health Care law, and it will not cut Y in Medicare spending, as the law instructs, but it will also not spend a little less than t...

If Republicans Are Serious About Debt Reduction, Defense Cuts Must Be On The Table
The Republican Pledge to America promised Budget cuts, but only to non-defense Discretionary Spending. Which leaves just 15% of the national Budget available for cutting. Many who are concerned with National Security are inclined to say that defense spending shouldn’t be cut as national defense is one of the few actual duties assigned to the Federal Government by the constitution. We should, it follows, cut spending from all the things the government isn’t supposed to be doing before...

Ryan Takes the Point on Fiscal Reform
With the National Debt now topping $14 Trillion, up from $13 trillion just seven months ago, and a Gallup Poll revealing the outgoing Democratic Congress to have among the lowest average Approval Ratings recorded in the last two decades, it is a great relief to hear that incoming House Republicans are planning to cut funding of their legislative offices by 5 percent. They are also cutting the House Appropriations Committee Budget by 9 percent. Both actions are part of new House Speaker John A. B...

Boehner: Real change needed in exchange for debt-limit increase
If the administration wants a hike in the statutory Debt ceiling, they will have to produce some agreement on broad Budget cuts and structural changes first, John Boehner warns today in an e-mail to Bloggers and the media.  Boehner drew the line in the sand while leaving himself some wiggle room on acceptable changes as the Debt Limit rapidly approaches and Congress runs out of maneuvering room (via Instapundit and Jim Geraghty): I’ve been notified that the Obama Administration intends to f...

Gary Johnson talks National Debt and National Security
By Grant Bosse  (MANCHESTER, NH) Gary Johnson says the United States is on the brink of a financial collapse, and only an immediate end to the federal Spending Spree will keep the country from going over the edge. The former New Mexico Governor was back in New Hampshire this week promoting the need for fiscal discipline and his organization, the Our America Initiative. In an interview with New Hampshire Watchdog on the New Hampshire Institute of Politics on the campus on St. Anselm College, t...

Re: While Rome Burns . . .
 Andy, I certainly agree with you that the promise regarding domestic Discretionary Spending in the Republican pledge document can only serve as a beginning. Federal spending can’t be brought under control without serious entitlement reform — that’s simply where the money is, and also where the out-of-control growth is. And it does look like Republicans are preparing to make some serious entitlement reform proposals in their first real Budget, the 2012 Budget, which Paul R...

The New Republican Rules
After the ceremonies and standing ovations died down, the new Republican House majority did get around to some crucial business today. By a straight party-line vote, the House approved a new rules package for the 112th Congress, 240-191. Republicans say passing the new package--a right granted by the Constitution--will foster openness and transparency and help curtail wasteful spending. There are nods to the Tea Party's "Contract From America," including the provision that each bill must cite it...

Can rules matter?
The Republicans in the House are planning to implement some new rules on spending and budgeting. Their aim is to fix the Loopholes through which the Democrats drove through their spending increases. The Democrats came in after the 2006 election claiming to be doing the same thing and we saw what happened with that and how they broke their own rules. These are some of the changes the GOP are implementing.In their new rules, Republicans are giving paygo the heave-ho and substituting a rule called...

Do the New House Rules Doom the Deficit?
Republicans like to say, We don't have a Deficit problem, we have a spending problem. So we shouldn't be surprised that according to the new rules passed in the Republican House, it'll be no problem for the GOP to cut taxes without paying for them. But that's a problem! Congress's PAYGO ("pay as you go") rules generally require the government to pay for changes to mandatory spending -- such as entitlements, welfare, Farm Subsidies, and Veterans spending -- with Tax Increases or Spending Cuts. Bu...

Then And Now: The House GOPs Evolving Promise To Cut $100 Billion
Then And Now: The House GOP’s Evolving Promise To Cut $100 Billion House Republicans yesterday found themselves in a bit of trouble when they tried to explain that the $100 billion in Spending Cuts that they have been promising was only “hypothetical,” and they intend to actually cut about half of that from the Budget. But for weeks, the GOP has been repeating over and over that it intended to lop $100 billion from the budget once it came into power, in line with the plan la...

VIDEOS: The House GOPs Evolving Promise To Cut $100 Billion From The Budget
House Republicans yesterday found themselves in a bit of trouble when they tried to explain that the $100 billion in Spending Cuts that they have been promising was only “hypothetical,” and they intend to actually cut about half of that from the Budget. But for weeks, the GOP has been repeating over and over that it intended to lop $100 billion from the budget once it came into power, in line with the plan laid out in the much-hyped “Pledge to America.” Watch a compilatio...

No Surprise, Republicans to Break Promise on Spending Cuts
No Surprise, Republicans to Break Promise on Spending Cuts In September, future House Speaker John Boehner unveiled the GOP Pledge to America, which among its other warmed-over Republican nostrums promised to save "at least $100 billion in the first year alone" from the federal Budget. In December, incoming House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) repeated the GOP guarantee that "a good $100 billion" would be trimmed. Now, after months of cowardly refusing to specify what those draconi...

An I Told You So Post
So, having heard for months that the Republicans really are serious about cutting Government Spending this time, and that they’d be able to do it without cutting Medicare, Social Security, or defense, even if it would be a laughably small $100 billion in cuts as compared to the $14 Trillion dollars in Deficits (a figure little different than that proposed by the American Commie-Socialist Party), the Republicans have returned to power and we get to see if they are actually going to put our ...

The Ryan-Rivlin Plan To Reform Medicare And Medicaid
Veronique de Rugy has a piece at The American magazine this morning that looks at the plan to reform Medicare and Medicaid proposed by Bipartisan plan by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) and former Clinton Administration budget director Alice Rivlin. The plan solves our Debt crisis by reducing spending enough that interest on our Debt does not end up consuming most of our budget in the future. Veronique describes the plan as having two principal features, neither of which ...

Paul Ryan: Obamacare Is a Fiscal Train Wreck
Get alerts when there is a new article that might interest you. The Democrats' Health Care law is a Budget buster. Misleading claims on its Deficit impact exclude the $115 billion needed to implement the law and over $500 billion in double-counting Social Security Payroll taxes, CLASS Act premiums, and Medicare reductions. The law was written to measure 10 years of Tax Increases to offset 6 years of new spending. The Democrats stripped costly provisions that were included in [the] initial score,...

Boehner: Spending cuts must accompany debt limit
House Speaker John Boehner says any increase in the nation's Debt Limit must include steps to cut federal spending. The Ohio Republican says the country cannot default on its Debt, but neither can it continue to borrow recklessly. His statement comes after the Obama Administration notified lawmakers that the government will reach the current Debt Limit of $14.3 Trillion this spring. The Debt Limit sets a ceiling on the government's borrowing authority. Boehner says in his statement that it's up ...