GOP sets up budget battle

House Republicans unveiled a plan to trim federal spending. President Obama will release his own budget next week.

A House committee this week passed a Republican plan to trim $32 billion from federal spending in the seven months remaining before Washington’s fiscal year ends in September. The plan, authored by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, would cut $40 billion from labor, health, education, transportation, foreign aid, and other programs while increasing defense spending. “Washington’s spending spree is over,” Ryan declared. President Obama will release his own budget next week, setting up a contest between the president’s plan, which will likely freeze spending at 2010 levels, and Republican efforts to roll back some spending to 2008 levels. However, some Democrats oppose any significant spending cuts, saying they’ll harm a fragile economic recovery; some Republicans, meanwhile, want to honor a GOP campaign promise to cut $100 billion this year.

All the GOP’s “righteous indignation and bloviated anger have summoned forth a hairball,” said Robert Reich in Business​Insider.com. Recognizing that “Americans don’t want big spending cuts,” Republicans aren’t even pretending to attack Social Security, Medicare, and defense, which is where the real money is. “This is embarrassing.” Mostly it’s predictable, said Ezra Klein in WashingtonPost.com. It’s easy to do “deficit reduction in the abstract.” Making specific cuts to food safety, education, border security, and the like is very, very hard.

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