Sens. Rand Paul, R-Ky., Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Jim DeMint, R-S.C., unveiled a plan to balance the budget in five years today. The blueprint, called “Platform to Revitalize America,” cuts spending by $11 trillion compared to President Obama’s budget and achieves a $111 billion surplus in by 2017.
“The whole point here is to show we can reasonably balance the budget within a five-year period,” DeMint said. “This idea that we have to look 30 years out to balance the budget is not only unnecessary, but it’s improbable. We cannot continue to spend at our current rate for 10 more years, much less 20 or 30 more years.
Asked whether this meant he could not support this year’s House Budget if it failed to balance the budget in ten years, DeMint said, “Our nation is on the edge of a fiscal and I’m not sure I could support any budget that doesn’t balance within ten years.”
Like Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity,” the Platform turns Medicare into a premium support system that would save an estimated $1 trillion over 10 years. Unlike the Ryan plan, the DeMint/Lee/Paul pplan also tackles Social Security by increasing the retirement age and indexing benefits. Medicaid is turned into a block-grant program.
Four cabinet-level agencies (Commerce, Education, Energy, and Housing and Urban Development) get the ax and the Transportation Security Administration gets privatized. Obamacare and the Dodd-Frank Act both get repealed and the plan would institute a 17 percent flat tax for individuals and corporations.
