Congress set to vote on budget-cutting plan

[April 14, 2011]  WASHINGTON (AP) -- The House and Senate are ready to vote on legislation cutting almost $40 billion from the budget for the current year, but President Barack Obama and his GOP rivals are both eager to move on to multiyear fiscal plans that cut trillions instead of billions.

Lawmakers were to vote Thursday on a long-overdue spending measure funding the day-to-day budgets of federal agencies through September. Later in the day, Republicans dominating the House will launch debate on a 2012-and-beyond plan that promises to cut the long-term budget blueprint Obama laid out in February by more than $6 trillion.

Obama countered Wednesday with a new call to increase taxes on wealthier people and impose quicker cuts to Medicare, launching a roiling debate in Congress and the 2012 presidential campaign to come.

Obama fired a broadside at the long-term GOP plan, which calls for transforming the Medicare health program for the aged into a voucher-like system for people under the age of 55 and imposing stringent cuts on Medicaid, which provides health care to the poor and disabled, including people in nursing homes.

More immediate, however, is the 2011 spending measure. It combines more than $38 billion in cuts to domestic accounts with changes to benefit programs, like children's health care, that Congress' own economists say are illusory.

Obama said Wednesday that spending cuts and higher taxes alike must be part of any deficit-reduction plan, including an end to Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy. He proposed an unspecified "debt failsafe" that would go into effect if Congress did not make sure the national debt would be falling by 2014 relative to the size of the overall economy.

"We have to live within our means, reduce our deficit and get back on a path that will allow us to pay down our debt," the president said in a speech at George Washington University, a few blocks from the White House. "And we have to do it in a way that protects the recovery, and protects the investments we need to grow, create jobs and win the future."

Obama's speech was salted with calls for bipartisanship, but it also bristled with attacks on Republicans. They want to "end Medicare as we know it," he said, and to extend tax cuts for the wealthy while demanding that seniors pay more for health care.

Obama spoke to an audience that included Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., author of the House Republican budget that drew repeated presidential scorn. The Budget Committee chairman later told reporters he had been excited to receive an invitation to the speech, believing the administration was extending an olive branch.

"Instead, what we got was a speech that was excessively partisan, dramatically inaccurate and hopelessly inadequate to addressing our country's pressing fiscal challenges," Ryan said. "What we heard today was not fiscal leadership from our commander in chief. What we heard today was a political broadside from our campaigner in chief."

The president spoke less than a week after he reached a compromise with House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, on the unprecedented package of spending cuts for this year, just in time to avoid a partial government shutdown. Both houses of Congress are expected to pass the measure and close the books on the current budget year, clearing the way for a far broader debate about the size and shape of the government.

Obama stepped to the podium at a juncture when tea party-backed Republicans are relishing early victories in the House, the 2012 Republican presidential field is just beginning to take shape and moderate Democratic lawmakers are charting their re-election campaigns. The president's emphasis on deficit reduction marked an appeal to independents as well as other voters who are eager to stem record annual deficits as well as gain control over a national debt of more than $14 trillion.

At the same time, Obama sought to keep faith with liberals and other supporters.

Obama's plan would cut military spending by $400 billion through 2023. Domestic programs would absorb $770 billion in cuts and mandatory programs such as agricultural subsidies another $360 billion.

An additional $480 billion would be saved from Medicare -- and from Medicaid, the state-federal program that is ticketed for a huge expansion under the health care law Obama signed into law last year.

In line with the wishes of Senate Democratic leaders, the president made no recommendations for savings from Social Security, which he said is neither in a crisis nor "a driver of our near-term deficit problems." He said he supports unspecified steps to strengthen it for the long term, but ruled out any attempt to privatize it.

Obama's plan relied on some of the same deficit-reduction measures proposed in December by a bipartisan fiscal commission he appointed. The president is scheduled to meet Thursday at the White House with the co-chairmen of the commission, Democrat Erskine Bowles and Republican Alan Simpson.

Neither Obama nor his aides distributed any detailed accounting of the effect of his recommendations on the deficit, which is expected to top $1.5 trillion this year, or the national debt.

Obama saved some of his sharpest rhetoric for Republican proposals to end traditional Medicare for anyone currently under 55, and to give the states near-total control over Medicaid.

For Medicare, he said: "It says instead of guaranteed health care, you will get a voucher. And if that voucher isn't worth enough to buy insurance, tough luck -- you're on your own."

He said the Republican budget could cut health care coverage for 50 million Americans, including grandparents needing nursing home care, children with autism and kids "with disabilities so severe that they require 24-hour care. These are the Americans we'd be telling to fend for themselves."

[Associated Press; By ANDREW TAYLOR]

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