STATEMENT OF ROBERT GREENSTEIN… IN RESPONSE TO REPUBLICAN BUDGET OFFER:
House Republican leaders portray the deficit-reduction offer that they issued yesterday as a fair middle ground. It isn’t…. [T]he new Republican offer proposes $800 billion over ten years…. Erskine Bowles, Alan Simpson, and some members of their commission… proposed tax changes that would raise $2.6 trillion in revenues over 2013-2022…. Republicans… proposed substantially deeper cuts in… Medicare and Medicaid than Bowles-Simpson…. How… does the new Republican plan get to $600 billion? Republicans do not say. When the well-being of millions of Americans is at stake — as it is with major changes in Medicare and Medicaid — that shouldn’t be acceptable. If… [they] propose $600 billion in health care entitlement savings, as they have every right to do, they should show us the specific changes they would make…. (Some news accounts report the House Republican leaders would raise the Medicare eligibility age to 67 and increase Medicare premiums for more affluent beneficiaries… those measures would raise only about one quarter of the $600 billion and raise questions as to whether House Republicans have an answer for what would happen to many 65 and 66 year olds.)…
TThe good news is that Republican leaders have made an offer, non-specific as it is in virtually all key areas…. The bad news is the guts of the offer itself — and its attempt to lock in a requirement for deep cuts in programs on which tens of millions of Americans of modest means rely, without coming clean on the nature and severity of the cuts that would be required.
