On Tuesday, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) will release his budget for the upcoming fiscal year. This will be the fourth consecutive time Ryan has authored House Republicans’ budget, and while Ryan’s plan is expected to pass with wide support in the House of Representatives yet again, the legislation likely won’t come to a vote in the United States Senate.
Ryan sat down for an exclusive interview with “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace yesterday to give a preview of his unreleased budget, which promises to balance the federal budget in 10 years. By comparison, his 2012 budget did not balance until 2040.
“The path we are on, which takes us away from ever balancing the budget and produces a debt crisis. That is the problem – the President has us on a path toward a debt crisis that hurts everybody. That brings us to a recession,” Ryan told Wallace. “We want people going back to work. We want higher wages and more jobs, a growing economy. We get that by balancing the budget.”
To get a balanced budget in 10 years versus 23 years, one would think that Ryan would have to make even deeper cuts to federal spending than his previous budget. Ryan told Wallace that was false – the federal government needs to make deep cuts to only one major program to achieve fiscal solvency: Obamacare.
“These are increases that have not come yet, so by repealing Obamacare and the Medicaid expansions, which haven’t occurred yet, we are basically preventing an explosion of a program that is already failing. So, we’re saying ‘don’t grow this program through Obamacare because it doesn’t work’,” Ryan explained. “And by not pushing people into this program we do save these kinds of dollars.”
At which point, Wallace jumped in to to clarify that Ryan was “saying that as part of your budget you would repeal, you assume the repeal of Obamacare?”
“Yes,” Ryan responded.
“Well, that’s not gonna happen,” Wallace told the former vice presidential candidate point blank.
“Well, we believe it should. That’s the point. This is what budgeting is all about, Chris. It’s about making tough choices to fix our country’s problems,” Ryan continued.
In a perfect world, producing the federal budget would be “all about” cutting programs that won’t work in order to put the country on a fiscally sustainable path. But as Wallace pointed out, repealing Obamacare is not going to happen anytime soon.
First, Republicans would have to win control of the Senate, which cannot happen until the end of next year at the earliest. Then, the president would have to sign the bill. Obama has made it clear he would veto any legislation that includes the repeal of Obamacare. Thus, the first realistic opportunity to repeal the program would be four years from now in 2017 when President Paul Ryan could sign an executive order repealing the harmful legislation himself.
Ryan’s budget has not yet been made public, so its unclear when Obamacare would have to be repealed for his budget to balance in the 10 years time he promised the Republican caucus. Regardless, even the bill’s reliance on the repeal of Obamacare makes the bill dead on arrival in the United States Senate.
Senate Democrats are set to propose their first budget in four years on Wednesday. The details of that budget are still unknown, but it is highly likely it will include some sort of permanent tax increase in order to pay for the country’s ongoing fiscal obligations. The president’s budget is late this year and he will reportedly send it to Congress later this month after the House and Senate have made their moves on the budget. The president’s budget will likely include his State of the Union proposals, such as mandatory preschool, and will most certainly call for tax increases – a measure House Republicans are unlikely to agree to.
Because Republicans are in the minority in the Senate and therefore do not control the budget committee, Senate Republicans will not present a formal budget. However, individual members can introduce their own budgets. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) could still propose an alternative budget similar to the one he proposed in 2012, but it likely won’t have the support of the Republican conference, let alone the entire Senate, ensuring that it would be dead on arrival as well.
And that brings us back to square one. Absent a federal budget, the U.S. government will most likely continue to write blank checks for the next two years, with no end in site to the country’s long-term and short-term spending problems.
While continuing to bank on the repeal of Obamacare may make Ryan popular with the conservative base and bolster his 2016 creds, it’s an unrealistic approach to tackling the nation’s debt problem and signals that House Republicans are not serious about proposing a budget that has any chance of attracting bipartisan support.
As Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) said yesterday on ABC’s “This Week,” “You know, the other side is not going to go away. If we’re going to solve these problems, it’s going to have to be done on a bipartisan basis.”
Rather than seeking to pass legislation that will be popular with conservatives, House Republicans should consider focusing on proposing legislation that has a fighting chance on making it to the President’s desk. Ryan’s budget does not.
