Less than an hour after House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan unveiled his 2013 budget, the White House was already out with a rebuttal touting President Barack Obama’s plan as the right one for America.
Except there’s a catch.
President Obama has yet to propose a budget this year.
The President is required by law to submit a budget for Congressional review the first Monday of February every year. But for the fourth time in his presidency, President Obama did not meet that deadline. Obama’s excuse this year was that the fiscal cliff negotiations created so much instability he did not have enough time to prepare.
“For the fourth time in five years this White House has proven it does not take trillion-dollar deficits seriously enough to submit a budget on time,” House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said in a statement at the time.
Flash forward more than a month later, and President Obama still hasn’t submitted a budget. The White House has promised it will release it’s own budget by the end of this month, but that has yet to occur.
“I don’t ever remember a president’s budget being this late,” one budget expert told USA Today, noting that there was some truth to the administration’s claims that the financial uncertainty made it especially difficult to come up with a plan on time.
Regardless of whether the prolonged fiscal cliff and sequestration drama (which actually occurs in some shape or form every few months every single year) played a part in President Obama delaying the release of his budget yet again, the fact remains that Obama’s 2013 budget does not exist, at least not publicly.
But that’s not how the White House makes it sound. In a statement sent to reporters this morning, the White House claimed that “the President has put forward a balanced approach to deficit reduction with no sacred cows.”
The statement goes on to cite the Medicare savings in Obama’s plan, closing tax loopholes and investing in small businesses as a few of the reasons Obama’s plan will put us on the path to prosperity but Paul Ryan’s won’t.
“The President’s plan puts our nation on a fiscally sustainable path and grows our economy from the middle class out,” the statement claims.
The White House’s statement cleverly refers to Obama’s proposal as a “plan” and not as a “budget” because it doesn’t have a budget to make direct comparisons to. The plan mentioned by the White House is presumably the last deal Obama offered to House Republicans to avoid the fiscal cliff, but who knows since the administration was purposefully vague in its response.
While Paul Ryan’s budget is perhaps too idealistic in its cuts to federal spending, Republicans can at least tout it as a tangible solution to the nation’s spending problems instead of mincing words to create the illusion of having ever proposed a budget in the first place like the White House.
