| U.S. Republicans present budget plan with massive cuts |
| Date: 2011/4/11 Click: 2170 |
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U.S. Republicans on Tuesday offered a budget plan for the coming year 2012 that would see a 5.8-trillion-dollar spending cut over 10 years. Democrats panned the plan as one-sided and lacking bigger defense cuts or tax increases.
The blueprint, written by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, includes major reforms to Medicaid and Medicare, but leaves Social Security largely alone. The plan would set a fixed rate of growth for Medicare spending, but big reforms in the plan would not be introduced for more than a decade, meaning cuts on Medicare spending would be comparatively little for a decade.
As a result, the plan fails to balance the federal budget for at least two decades. It would not reduce public debt by as much as the plan presented by President Barack Obama's debt commission, which included tax increases and would end the Bush-era tax cuts for wealthy Americans.
The Republican plan, called "The Path to Prosperity," boasts it would create nearly 1 million private-sector jobs in 2013 and bring unemployment down to 4 percent by 2015.
The plan, however, has virtually no chance of making it through the Senate. Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin has already criticized it as being one-sided and lacking bigger defense cuts or tax increases.
"When he doesn't address savings in the Department of Defense and doesn't deal with revenue, it results in dramatic cuts in Medicare benefits and Medicaid services," Durbin was quoted by media reports as saying.
Durbin and other senators are working on a deficit reduction package that would include cuts to discretionary spending, entitlement reform and tax reform. |
