Senate Democrats on track to pass budget

WASHINGTON (AP) — Democ­rats con­trol­ling the Sen­ate moved on Fri­day toward approv­ing their first bud­get in four years, promis­ing another, almost $1 tril­lion round of tax increases on top of more than $600 bil­lion in higher taxes on the wealthy enacted in January.

The non­bind­ing but polit­i­cally sym­bolic mea­sure would pro­tect safety-net pro­grams for the poor and pop­u­lar domes­tic pri­or­i­ties like edu­ca­tion, health research and fed­eral law enforce­ment agen­cies from cuts sought by House Repub­li­cans, who adopted a far more aus­tere plan on Thursday.

The Demo­c­ra­tic plan caters to party stal­warts on the lib­eral edge of the spec­trum just as the House GOP mea­sure was crafted to appeal to more recent tea party arrivals. The $1 tril­lion in new rev­enue would accrue over the com­ing decade and would be cou­pled with a net $875 bil­lion in spend­ing cuts, gen­er­ated by mod­est cuts to fed­eral health care pro­grams, domes­tic agen­cies and the Pen­ta­gon and reduced gov­ern­ment bor­row­ing costs.

The GOP bud­get pro­posal, sim­i­lar to pre­vi­ous plans offered by Bud­get Com­mit­tee Chair­man Paul Ryan, R-Wis., demon­strates that it’s pos­si­ble, at least math­e­mat­i­cally, to bal­ance the bud­get within a decade with­out rais­ing taxes. But to do so, Ryan, his party’s vice pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee last year, assumes deep cuts that would force mil­lions from pro­grams for the poor like food stamps and Med­ic­aid and cut almost 20 per­cent from domes­tic agency bud­get lev­els assumed less than two years ago.

Ryan’s plan passed the House on a mostly party-line, 221–207 vote, with 10 Repub­li­cans join­ing Democ­rats against it.

Sen­a­tors braced for dozens of votes dur­ing a marathon ses­sion expected on Fri­day, with pes­simists in the Capi­tol pre­dict­ing a final vote on the Demo­c­ra­tic plan in the pre-dawn hours of Sat­ur­day. In early vot­ing Fri­day morn­ing, Democ­rats rejected yet another attempt to repeal Obama’s land­mark health care law by a strictly party-line vote.

That tall stack of votes fol­lows up a quin­tet of polit­i­cally freighted Sen­ate tal­lies Thurs­day night, includ­ing a move by Democ­rats to force a vote on the con­tro­ver­sial Ryan bud­get, which was rejected by a 59–40 vote, with five Repub­li­cans join­ing every Demo­c­rat in opposition.

Repub­li­cans coun­tered with a move by Jeff Ses­sions, R-Ala., putting Democ­rats on record in oppo­si­tion to bal­anc­ing the bud­get by the end of the decade. It failed on a near party-line vote.

Indeed, Thursday’s votes demon­strated the raw pol­i­tics dri­ving the bud­get debate, which is more a dis­play of party posi­tions and pri­or­i­ties than an attempt to move the com­bat­ants closer together.

The duel­ing House and Sen­ate bud­get plans are anchored on oppo­site ends of the ide­o­log­i­cal spec­trum in Wash­ing­ton, appeal­ing to core par­ti­sans in war­ring GOP and Demo­c­ra­tic tribes long grid­locked over how to attack bud­get deficits. The GOP plan caters to tea party forces, while Sen­ate Bud­get Com­mit­tee Chair­man Patty Mur­ray, D-Wash., crafted a mea­sure designed to nail down sup­port from lib­eral sen­a­tors like Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, who vehe­mently oppose cuts to safety net programs.

What the Ryan and Mur­ray bud­gets both fail to do is reach out to the polit­i­cal mid­dle, where any pos­si­ble bar­gain would have to be forged. Pres­i­dent Barack Obama has been reach­ing out to law­mak­ers in hopes of spark­ing a bud­get com­pro­mise that has proved so elusive.

But Murray’s plan would actu­ally increase gov­ern­ment spend­ing — on top of a base­line that already assumes auto­matic bud­get increases aver­ag­ing more than 5 per­cent a year — after account­ing for the $1.2 tril­lion cost of repeal­ing the auto­matic cuts, known as seques­tra­tion. That means the net cuts to the deficit would amount to just a few hun­dred bil­lion dol­lars in a fed­eral bud­get esti­mated at $46 tril­lion or so over the com­ing decade.

Murray’s posi­tion is that the auto­matic cuts were designed to prod Wash­ing­ton into action on the debt and were never intended to take effect. By that math, her bud­get promises $1.85 tril­lion in lower deficits after 10 years. She points out that Repub­li­cans on a 2011 deficit “super­com­mit­tee” used the same math when describ­ing their proposals.

“Seques­tra­tion was not deficit reduc­tion,” Mur­ray said. “It was there to trig­ger deficit reduc­tion that would come from replac­ing it.”

Murray’s plan promises a $693 bil­lion deficit in 2014, drop­ping to the $400 bil­lion range for the mid­dle years of the decade. While large, such deficits would hover just above 2 per­cent of gross domes­tic prod­uct, a level that many ana­lysts see as eco­nom­i­cally sustainable.

Posted by Matt Echelberry on Mar 22 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.