Chairman Conrad Rejects President Obama’s Budget
It isn’t often that Democrats oppose the first budget a Democratic president submits but that’s exactly what’s happening. Kent Conrad is leading the opposition to President Obama’s budget:
Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota said the Senate Budget Committee, which he chairs, will vote on his version Wednesday.
“We’ve made hundreds of billions of dollars of changes to make this work to get down to the deficit goal and at the same time maintain the president’s priorities, education and energy and health care,” Conrad said as he left a closed meeting in the Capitol, where he briefed Senate Democratic colleagues on his plan.
Conrad and other centrist Democratic senators, whose support is critical to passing the legislation, have raised concerns about the long-term impact of the president’s spending plan on the deficit.
Sen. Conrad is doing President Obama a favor in rewriting the budget. President Obama’s budget wouldn’t have garnered the votes needed to pass. Had that happened, a serious case could’ve been made that that defeat was a no confidence vote against President Obama.
That would’ve been political disaster for President Obama. With his approval ratings on a steady decline, President Obama couldn’t have taken such a hit. Right now, his personal popularity is significantly higher than is support for his radical policies.
Judd Gregg isn’t letting Sen. Conrad’s blueprint plan off the hook without fighting back:
Conrad’s budget also curtails Obama’s fix of the costly alternative minimum tax and doesn’t account for increased payments for doctors who care for Medicare recipients, said Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, the top Republican on the Budget Committee.
“You can get these presidential numbers down by using a lot of gimmicks that the president didn’t use. That would be a mistake. Let’s be honest with the Americans,” Gregg said Tuesday.
“It’s certainly not a gimmick,” Conrad responded. “We faced up to changes.”
Republicans were also critical of Conrad’s plan to calculate the budget deficit over five years instead of 10, meaning a common measure of government spending, the 10-year cost, wouldn’t officially be part of the price. Gregg accused Conrad of trying to hide the true cost of the plan.
I haven’t reviewed Sen. Conrad’s budget so I can’t certify that his plan is filled with gimmicks but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was. Sen. Conrad is putting a 5 year budget together but people already know that President Obama’s budget is irresponsibly spendy. They know that because they’ve read the articles telling about the $9,300,000,000,000 increase in the debt over the next decade due to President Obama’s budget.
Whichever way you present it, President Obama’s budget still spends too much, taxes too much and borrows too much. Whichever way you slice it, his deficits still average $1,000,000,000,000 per year. That figures out to being 25 percent of President Obama’s FY2010 budget. By comparison, the best post-9/11 deficit from President Bush came in at $160,000,000,000, which is approximately 5 percent of that year’s budget.
In this instance, the numbers really do tell a tale. Unfortunately for America’s taxpayers, the tale they tell is one of presidential irresponsibility.
Technorati Tags: Budgets, President Obama, Kent Conrad, Education, Energy, Health Care, Deficits, Democrats, Judd Gregg, Loyal Opposition, Republicans, Fiscal Restraint
Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog
March 25th, 2009 at 11:43 am
““We’ve made hundreds of billions of dollars of changes to make this work to get down to the deficit goal…”
That goal, of course, is trillions over what His Hollowness has decried about the previous admin.
And will the Congress, in all its largess to itself, add to the FBI budget so they (the FBI) can hire all the additional agents it will take to track down all the crooks (including congresspeople on the take) that will make Tammany Hall look like a church social? Just sayin’.
March 25th, 2009 at 11:57 am
I just read where the Postmaster General says the USPS will have record deficits this year.
Well, duh! Bloated and top-heavy as the agency is, Congress should let it go the way of the dinosaur. If it could make money, some enterprising companies would be more than willing to step in. They would have to be non-union, of course, and only pay wages for services actually rendered, so I guess Congress would never do it anyway.
Heck, they set the standard for getting paid for services not rendered.
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