Debt Panel Chairs Rip Budget Plans
The Hill reports:
The former co-chairmen of the president’s bipatisan debt commission on Tuesday blasted both President Obama's 2012 budget and congressional Republican plans to cut spending.
The two chairmen said both would fail ward off a future economic crisis due to out of control debt.
Chairman Alan Simpson, a former Wyoming Republican senator, told the Senate Budget Committee both plans are “light” budget proposals. He said with the current plans on the table, foreign governments within two years will likely realize the U.S. has done too little to address the deficit and start selling off their holdings of U.S. debt.
Chairman Erskine Bowles, a former Clinton chief of staff, said Obama’s 2012 budget doesn’t do nearly enough since it does not tackle entitlements or defense spending.
He also derided the Republican plan to cut $61 billion in total from spending this year.
Noting that the proposal would only cut 1.6 percent of the budget, he said, “1.6 percent is nothing. I could cut 1.6 percent of my budget tonight!”
Bowles said that, even as the GOP plan does little to solve the $1.6 trillion annual deficit, because it is narrowly focused on non-security discretionary spending, some people are being hit “disproportionately.”
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