House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan says President Barack Obama’s $3.8 billion budget is full of “accounting gimmicks” and “tricks” and once they are stripped away it increases spending and taxes, and barely reduces the deficit. The Wisconsin congressman also told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren Tuesday Obama’s 2013 spending plan is actually “chasing higher spending with higher taxes.”
“What’s wrong with it most of all is what [the budget] doesn’t do — it doesn’t fix our problem,” Ryan said. “He doesn’t even pretend to actually fix our fiscal problem. So instead of having sort of an American built to last, I would call it America drowning in debt.
“And then when you strip away all the accounting gimmicks and all the counting tricks — take all that way — it doesn’t come close to even doing what he says it does. He says it reduces the deficit by $4 trillion,” he said. “Doesn’t do any of that when you strip away all the budget gimmicks. It increases spending net over $1.5 trillion, increases taxes by $1.9 trillion, and has a measly $400 billion of deficit reduction over an entire 10-year period.
“So he’s proposing to spend $47 trillion over 10 years.” Ryan continued. “And so instead of increasing our debt by 78 percent, which is what the status quo is doing, he’s increasing debt by 76 percent — $11 trillion added to our national debt under this budget.”
Ryan noted that the budget’s projections are based on Obama’s policies, which do absolutely nothing to decrease spending.
“He’s actually chasing higher spending with higher taxes — and he’s doing nothing to address the drivers of our debt . . . and the frustrating, disappointing thing about this, Greta, is he knows this — he knows we have a debt crisis in this country,” Ryan said. “And what’s troubling to those of us who care so much about this country — about our economy, about people not being lied to with empty promises of benefits, about people living on the safety net, about people counting on a Medicare and Social Security — if we don’t do something to fix these programs, then those people are going to hurt the first.”
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