Former vice presidential candidate and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) attacked President Obama for not being willing to gut our social safety nets in his latest budget proposal -- that they're going to ignore like the rest of his budget proposals -- and suggested that doing so was waving some sort of white flag on being fiscally responsible -- because we all know the party that gave us tax cuts that weren't paid for along with a couple of invasions left off of the books are the fiscally responsible ones.
Here's now Fox covered the interview at their blog: Obama ‘Basically Raised the White Flag’: Paul Ryan Blasts 2015 Spending Plan:
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) joined Martha MacCallum tonight to discuss the situation in Ukraine and the 2015 budget. [...]
Ryan also discussed the 2015 budget that Obama released today. “It is one of those dead-on-arrival budgets,” he said of the proposal, which calls for $56 billion in new spending.
“I think he’s going farther to the left,” Ryan said. “This is a budget where the president basically raised the white flag and has surrendered his administration for the next three years.”
Yes, how horrible it is that President Obama is moving further to the left and maybe listening to what the majority of the American public thinks about making cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
I guess spending more money on infrastructure is "waving the white flag" as well: Obama Budget Seeks To Restore Crumbling Federal Buildings:
At the IRS building in Chamblee, Ga., much of the parking lot sits roped off and neglected, with structural deficiencies making it unsafe for employees to use. The fire alarm system is 20 years old and badly needs to be replaced at the federal building in Reston, Va. And at the Coast Guard's building on the Boston waterfront, water is seeping into the basement, speeding up the deterioration of the building's foundation.
Just as much of the nation's infrastructure is outdated and in dire need of modernization, so too are many of the buildings owned by the U.S. General Services Administration, the federal government's landlord.
"As a result of consecutive years of reduced funding, GSA’s portfolio of facilities have had to forgo billions in capital improvements, including major repairs and maintenance as well as critical additions to the inventory," GSA Administrator Dan Tangherlini told reporters during a conference call Tuesday. [...]
Tangherlini argued that President Barack Obama's FY 2015 budget proposal, which was released Tuesday, would help rectify this situation by granting GSA "Zero Net Budget Authority." With this authority, GSA would be able to invest the rent it collects from agencies back into repairs and investments for the buildings it maintains.
"This is something that any responsible real estate manager in the private sector is able to do, but for too many years we could not," explained Tangherlini, using the IRS parking lot in Georgia as a prime example.
"Half of [it] is roped off because it is unsafe and unusable," he said. "This isn’t because of a natural disaster or something fundamentally wrong with the building. It is because problems with this facility have slowly but surely built up over time.
"The president has included more than $7 million to repair this facility in the FY15 Budget, but we would have been able to address this long before it required this level of investment if we consistently had Zero Net Budget Authority," he added.
Overall, Obama's budget seeks $745 million to invest in nine construction projects, including ports, office buildings and courthouses.
MacCallum asked Ryan about his audit of federal anti-poverty programs before the interview ended, but somehow failed to mention that the research they did undermined the talking points he continued to use here: Paul Ryan’s Audit Of Federal Anti-Poverty Programs Finds Many Are Actually Very Effective:
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) released a 204-page report on Monday analyzing the effectiveness of the nation’s anti-poverty programs 50 years after President Lyndon Johnson declared a national War on Poverty.
The assessment, which is designed to kick off his campaign to revamp federal welfare programs, broadly characterizes federal aid as counterproductive and ineffective. Ryan argues that federal programs have contributed to the nation’s high poverty rate and “created what’s known as the poverty trap.” The report argues, “Federal programs are not only failing to address the problem. They are also in some significant respects making it worse.”
But a closer look at the analysis undermines the old Ronald Reagan adage, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” As Ryan’s own analysis points out, numerous progressive-minded spending programs have helped millions of Americans and significantly reduced the nation’s poverty rate. Below are 16 examples from Ryan’s own report of how the government can help lower-income Americans make ends meet:
