Ryan Offers GOP Budget, Obama Offers Clues

Congress is working to avoid a government shutdown, while also chewing on some long-term budget proposals.

FOX News Radio’s Jared Halpern reports from Capitol Hill:

It’s not clear when the President’s budget will be released – it’s now five weeks overdue – but President Obama told his Export Council one thing that will be in that budget is more infrastructure spending.

(President Obama) “We are going to, in our budget, continue to push Congress to see if we can essentially deal with deferred maintenance.”

The White House has already said the President’s budget will not set a goal of balancing spending and revenues.  Instead, the White House seeks to get deficits down to below 3% of the Gross Domestic Product.

At the White House, Mike Majchrowitz, FOX News Radio.

READ a statement from the White House on the Ryan budget proposal:

The President believes that there is an opportunity for Democrats and Republicans to come together around a balanced plan to grow the economy and shrink the deficit by investing to create jobs, cutting wasteful spending, and strengthening programs like Medicare and Medicaid.  This approach will require both parties to compromise and make tough choices.

While the House Republican budget aims to reduce the deficit, the math just doesn’t add up.  Deficit reduction that asks nothing from the wealthiest Americans has serious consequences for the middle class.  By choosing to give the wealthiest Americans a new tax cut, this budget as written will either fail to achieve any meaningful deficit reduction, raise taxes on middle class families by more than $2,000 – or both.  By choosing not to ask for a single dime of deficit reduction from closing tax loopholes for the wealthy and well-connected, this budget identifies deep cuts to investments like education and research – investments critical to creating jobs and growing the middle class.  And to save money, this budget would turn Medicare into a voucher program–undercutting the guaranteed benefits that seniors have earned and forcing them to pay thousands more out of their own pockets.  We’ve tried this top-down approach before.  The President still believes it is the wrong course for America.

That’s why the President has put forward a balanced approach to deficit reduction with no sacred cows.  It includes more Medicare savings over the next decade than the House Republican budget, but it does so by cracking down on waste and fraud, not by asking middle class seniors to bear the burden.  It closes tax loopholes for the wealthiest and biggest corporations so we can still afford to create jobs by investing in education, manufacturing, infrastructure, and small businesses.  The President’s plan puts our nation on a fiscally sustainable path and grows our economy from the middle class out.

While the President disagrees with the House Republican approach, we all agree we need to leave a better future for our children.  The President will continue to work with Republicans and Democrats in Congress to grow the economy and cut the deficit in a balanced way. This is the approach the American people overwhelmingly support, and that is what the President will continue to fight for each day.