House centrists to offer Bowles-Simpson plan as budget substitute
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
House centrists to offer Bowles-Simpson plan as budget
substitute
By: Erik Wasson, The Hill
A bipartisan group of lawmakers in the House will offer a budget
plan Thursday based on the recommendations of President Obama's
fiscal commission.
The group, led by Reps. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) and Steven
LaTourette (R-Ohio), plans to put forward the budget as a
substitute amendment to the House GOP's 2013 budget, authored by
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.).
The fiscal commission's recommendations, authored by former
Clinton Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles and former Republican Sen.
Alan Simpson (Wyo.), would reduce the deficit through a combination
of spending cuts and revenue increases from tax reform.
"The budget debate so far has been completely partisan, and our
proposal is the only one with support from both parties," Cooper
said in a statement.
Reps. Charlie Bass (R-N.H.), Tom Reed (R-N.Y.), Kurt
Schrader (D-Ore.) and Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) are also part of the
group pushing the Bowles-Simpson plan.
"I'm tired of passing bills in the House, watching them die in
the Senate and pretending that counts as success," said LaTourette.
"Americans want us to work together like adults, pass a budget with
bipartisan support in both Houses and have it signed into law."
The budget alternative's sponsors say the amendment reduces the
deficit by more than $4 trillion over the next 10 years, with
two-thirds of the reduction coming from spending cuts and one-third
through tax increases.
Cutting tax loopholes yields about $1 trillion in deficit
reduction, they said.
The Cooper-LaTourette amendment also calls for "lowering
individual and corporate tax rates across the board, with the top
rate reduced to between 23 and 29 percent unless the top rate must
be higher than 29 percent to offset preferential treatment for
capital gains." It also calls for ending taxes on overseas profits
- something favored by most Republicans.
The Ryan plan calls for a top corporate and individual rate of
25 percent. Neither plan specifies which popular tax deductions
would be eliminated to pay for the lower tax rates.
For 2013, the Cooper-LaTourette amendment sets discretionary
spending at $1.043 trillion, below the August debt deal's $1.047
trillion but above the $1.028 trillion in the Ryan plan.
The amendment takes a bigger bite out of defense than the Ryan
plan. It cuts $685 billion beyond the August debt deal over 10
years, split evenly between defense and non-defense spending. The
Ryan plan increases defense spending by $200 billion over the
August debt deal.
On hot-button items like Medicare and Social Security, the
alternative resolution calls on Congress to come together to
consider raising the Social Security eligibility age and limiting
the growth of Medicare and other health entitlements like Medicaid
to gross domestic product growth plus 1 percent. That cap is
similar to the cap in a plan Ryan wrote with Sen. Ron Wyden
(D-Ore.) to partially privatize Medicare. The Ryan budget features
deeper cuts to Medicare spending.
The Cooper-LaTourette amendment proposes replacing automatic
spending cuts triggered by failure of the deficit supercommittee in
a way similar to the Ryan plan. Like Ryan, the amendment tasks
committees with coming up with replacement savings by April 27. The
amendment includes the Armed Services Committee in this effort,
however. It also limits the replacement to fiscal 2013.
Centrists have been working to forge a bipartisan "grand
bargain" on the deficit and hope that their efforts will bear fruit
in a lame-duck session after the election, when Congress has to
deal with the Bush-era tax rates, a debt-ceiling increase and the
automatic spending cuts stemming from the supercommittee
failure.