Schumer Exposes The GOP On The Budget

Chuck Schumer changes the debate:

"A bipartisan compromise simply will not be found in the domestic discretionary spending cuts alone," Schumer said in a half-hour presentation at the Center for American Progress. Without a broader scope, Schumer said, "we won't be able to come to a compromise on a seven month budget."

Schumer's entreaty changes the frame of the debate on Capitol Hill, which for weeks has been driven by Republican leaders, who have isolated their focus to domestic discretionary spending. Democratic leaders, who are unwilling to countenance major cuts to government services, had little luck playing on GOP turf, but will now have a coherent alternative to point to when negotiations over how to fund the government continue in coming days.

Schumer noted that the GOP's plan for spending cuts does almost nothing to reduce the deficit -- a fact that runs at cross-purposes to their insistence that the deficit must be reduced.

"Right now a very small, very intense ideological tail is wagging the dog over in the House of Representatives," Schumer said. "Their fervor for spending cuts is not grounded in deficit reduction at all. Instead the far right wing has deliberately confused two separate issues. They've conflated reducing the deficit -- which is not their true priority -- with cutting government -- which is."

Schumer endorsed the approaches taken by Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, both of whom reduced or eliminated deficits by cutting discretionary spending and addressing entitlements and tax revenues. He identified achievable savings on all three flanks, including cuts to defense spending, agriculture subsidies, and a surtax on millionaires and billionaires.

Yes! Yes, Yes, Yes! This is correct! So what did the GOP say:

Republicans were caught off guard by the Democrats' new approach.

"Right now we need to crawl before we can walk, and that means finishing last year's business and complete a spending bill," said Michael Steel, spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner.

Don Stewart, spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, also tried to retrain the focus on the narrow sliver of the budget where Republicans feel most comfortable. "Their answer is to raise taxes, not to cut spending, and that's not something anyone else is talking about," he said.

"They want to raise taxes, grrrrr!" The GOP is a joke, void of any real ideas to govern. Their cuts to discretionary, non-defense spending are a joke, and don't do anything about the deficit.