House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan defended his budget package on Sunday and insisted that President Barack Obama is denying the American people upward mobility.
The Wisconsin Republican proposes a pair of tax cuts: 10 percent for low- and middle-income earners and 25 percent for high-earning Americans. He wants to do away with tax shelters and loopholes “disproportionately used by those higher-income earners.”
“The president is proposing higher tax rates and more loopholes, more complexity to the tax code, which is contrary to this bipartisan consensus that we’re seeing evolve in this country,” Ryan said on “Fox News Sunday.”
The House Ways and Means Committee will determine how the new code will be applied to taxpayers, Ryan said.
“Whether it’s distributionally the same as the current code, it’s impossible to answer that question,” he told host Chris Wallace. “Is your job or goal to treat the symptoms of poverty, to make it easier to live with, or is the goal to eradicate poverty by treating the root causes? What we want to do is have welfare reform that gets people off of lives of dependency and onto lives of self sufficiency.
“Unfortunately . . . the president’s agenda creates more of a dependent culture, creates people that are mores stuck in poverty, because it denies the idea of upward mobility,” he continued.
Ryan also defended criticism of his budget with regard to Medicare.
“Medicare grows at the same rate under our budget as it does under Obama’s,” he said. “Here is the key, critical difference: The president’s healthcare law puts 15 bureaucrats in charge of Medicare. We put 50 million seniors in charge of their Medicare. We’re saying, ‘Get rid of the healthcare law . . . give them the guaranteed benefit that they organized their lives around.’ But in order to make good on that promise . . . you have to reform it for the next generation.
“We save and strengthen the program,” he said. “The current law makes it go bankrupt and puts this board of 15 bureaucrats in charge of price-controlling, which will lead to denied care for current seniors.”
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