From Congressman Paul Ryan’s office.
Claim 1: “Winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will save $1 trillion.”
Reality: The Reid plan relies on the inaccurate assumption that surge-level spending in Iraq and Afghanistan is scheduled to continue over the next decade. An honest budget cannot claim to save taxpayers’ dollars by cutting spending that was not requested and will not be spent. Senate Democrats are employing a budget gimmick that will not fool the credit markets and does not address the urgent need for Washington to get its fiscal house in order.
Claim 2: “Paul Ryan’s budget also included this savings in its deficit reduction calculation.”
Reality: False. The House-passed budget cuts $6.2 trillion in spending relative to President Obama’s Fiscal Year 2012 budget request. This $6.2 trillion figure assumes ZERO savings from the global war on terror relative to the President’s budget.
Harry tried to pull a fast one by including spending for two wars which are not projected to last indefinitely.
The $2.7 trillion debt-limit increase proposal offered by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid contains a $1 trillion gimmick meant to disguise the plan’s shallowness on spending cuts. Supporters of the Reid plan are measuring their savings against a baseline that assumes the continuation of surge-level spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, even though the President has neither requested this funding nor signaled that he might request it. Instead, the President has signaled the opposite: a troop drawdown over the next few years. In other words, the Reid plan is claiming credit for “savings” that were already scheduled to occur, and for “cutting” spending that no one has requested.
Rather than defend this gimmick on the merits, supporters of the Reid plan are defending it by claiming that House Republicans “also included” this $1 trillion in savings when calculating spending reductions in the budget resolution that passed the House last April. This claim is false. The House-passed budget cuts $6.2 trillion in spending relative to President Obama’s FY2012 budget request, and this spending reduction assumes ZERO savings from the global war on terror relative to the President’s budget.
In the interest of maximum transparency, House Republicans produced additional estimates in order to provide a broad range of comparisons by which outsiders could judge the seriousness of the their budget’s commitment to real spending cuts and controls.
http://illinoisreview.typepad.com/illinoisreview/2011/07/a-trillion-dollar-gimmick.html
As with the ObamaCare trainwreck, the Dems tried to sneak in all kinds of tax increases and thought no one would notice. The bottom line is that tax and spend Dems will always be true to their nature.
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- Meet the New Plan, Same as the Old Plan (Reid Phantom Savings) (gunnyg.wordpress.com)
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