By MARK LANDLER
WASHINGTON — President Obama opened a full-frontal assault Tuesday on the federal budget adopted by House Republicans, condemning it as a “Trojan horse” that would greatly deepen inequality in the United States, and painting it as the manifesto of a party that had swung radically to the right.
Listing what he said would be draconian cuts to college scholarships, medical research, national parks and even weather forecasts, Mr. Obama said the Republican budget was “so far to the right, it makes the Contract With America” — Newt Gingrich’s legislative insurgency of 1994 — “look like the New Deal.”
Mr. Obama’s scathing attack, in a lunchtime speech to editors and reporters from The Associated Press, was part of a broad indictment of the Republican Party that included the president’s likely opponent in the fall, Mitt Romney.
Mr. Romney, the president said, praised a previous version of the Republican budget as “marvelous.” In a dig at his challenger’s upper-crust vocabulary, Mr. Obama noted that marvelous “is a word you don’t often hear when it comes to a budget; it’s a word you don’t often hear generally.”
With Republicans starting to coalesce around Mr. Romney as the party’s likely nominee, Mr. Obama was sharpening his political message for the election — one that draws a stark contrast between his and Mr. Romney’s visions for the country, and flatly rejects the Reagan-era mantra of trickle-down prosperity.
The Republican budget, and the philosophy it represents, he said, is “antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everyone who’s willing to work for it — a place where prosperity doesn’t trickle down from the top, but grows outward from the heart of the middle class.”
Republicans fired back quickly at the president, with the House speaker, John A. Boehner, accusing him of lobbing “partisan potshots” rather than responding to their budget plan with a responsible counteroffer.
The House budget “makes the tough choices the president refuses to make to address the staggering deficits and debt that are slowing our economic recovery, costing jobs and threatening to destroy the American dream,” Mr. Boehner said in a statement issued minutes after his speech.
For Mr. Obama, it was the latest in a string of combative speeches, in which he has sought to make the House Republicans a proxy for the broader Republican Party and present himself as a brake on their radical agenda.
His timing added to the political punch: the president spoke on the day of the Republican primary in Wisconsin, home of the budget’s key architect, Representative Paul D. Ryan. A strong victory in Wisconsin would add to the air of inevitability building around Mr. Romney’s candidacy. Mr. Obama’s reference to Mr. Romney was the first time in an official address that he had mentioned him by name.
“This is not just another run-of-the-mill political debate,” Mr. Obama said, adding, “I can’t remember a moment when the choice between competing visions of our future has been so unambiguously clear.”
Americans, he said, could not afford to elect a Republican president at a time of fragile economic recovery, with a weak job market and a crushing national debt from “two wars, two massive tax cuts and an unprecedented financial crisis.”
The widening gulf between the rich and everyone else, Mr. Obama said, was hobbling the country’s economic growth. He cited studies that found that societies with less income inequality had stronger and steadier growth.
“In this country, broad-based prosperity has never trickled down from the success of a wealthy few,” the president said. “It has always come from the success of a strong and growing middle class. That’s how a generation who went to college on the G.I. Bill, including my grandfather, helped build the most prosperous economy the world has ever known. That’s why a C.E.O. like Henry Ford made it his mission to pay his workers enough so they could buy the cars they made.”
Many of Mr. Obama’s themes echoed his State of the Union address in January and his speech in Osawatomie, Kan., last December, where he invoked a Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, who he said combined a fervent belief in the free market with a resolve to protect people from its worst predations.
But the president reserved his harshest words for the 2013 budget proposal. The budget, he said, calls for radical across-the-board cuts in discretionary spending, as well as tax cuts, mostly for households earning more than $250,000, which he said would cost $4.6 trillion over the next decade.
“Disguised as a deficit reduction plan, it’s really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country. It’s nothing but thinly veiled social Darwinism,” Mr. Obama said. “By gutting the very things we need to grow an economy that’s built to last — education and training, research and development — it’s a prescription for decline.”
For millionaires, the president said, the average annual benefit of the tax cuts would be $150,000 — money that could be used to pay for computer labs in schools, salaries for police officers and firefighters, medical care for returning veterans, or a year’s worth of prescription drugs for older people.
The White House’s calculation for the tax benefit is straightforward, but Republicans on the House Budget Committee say it is wrong. The average household earning more than $1 million would gain $46,000 from the House budget’s repeal of the Medicare hospital insurance tax that was part of the health care law, the Republicans said, and $105,000 from the extension of the Bush-era tax cuts that Mr. Obama wants to expire next year.
In truth, the shape of the tax code is left largely unknown by the House-passed budget. The blueprint prescribes that the current personal tax code be scrapped, with the six existing income tax rates collapsed into just two, 25 percent and 10 percent. The revenue loss would have to be made up by the repeal of unspecified tax credits and deductions.
But the budget leaves it up to the House Ways and Means Committee to determine how that would be done. In theory, tax writers could focus on tax breaks that primarily help the rich, like the deduction for charitable giving, or end the biggest tax breaks only for upper income earners, like the mortgage interest deduction and the employer deduction for health insurance.
Democrats say such selective changes to the tax code would never recoup such large cuts to income tax rates, especially since the Ryan plan does not foresee increasing tax rates on capital gains and dividends.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment