HBO: Bill Maher, The Budget Favored By Most People

SLATE: Matt Yglesias, Congressional Progressive Caucus Shows You What a Liberal Budget Looks Like:

“But people should take it seriously.  The CPC envisions America becoming a country that has higher taxes, commits a much smaller share of national output to its military, and compensates its health care providers less generously. That's not everyone's cup of tea, but it's not like a wild and crazy dream.” 

ABC NEWS: Chris Good, Left, Right Unveil US Budget Utopias

“These two documents represent the poles of what is possible. The House is America’s epicenter of drastic partisan divide. Republicans in the House are very fiscally conservative; the House Progressive Caucus, the Democratic Party’s most liberal wing, is very liberal when it comes to spending on infrastructure and services.”

WASHINGTON POST: Ezra Klein, House Progressives have the best answer to Paul Ryan

“Comparatively, both Ryan and the House Progressives are offering much sharper, more bracing, and more ambitious efforts. They have identified what they consider to believe the country’s core problems and laid out precisely how they would like to see them fixed. And that’s fine for the House Progressives. But at some point, more is required from the House Republicans.” 

WASHINGTON POST: Dylan Matthews, House Progressive Budget’s top tax rate still much lower than Eisenhower’s

NEW YORK TIMES: Paul Krugman, After the Flimflam

“No, the only thing the progressive caucus and Mr. Ryan share is audacity. And it’s refreshing to see someone break with the usual Washington notion that political “courage” means proposing that we hurt the poor while sparing the rich. No doubt the caucus plan is too audacious to have any chance of becoming law; but the same can be said of the Ryan plan.”

SLATE: Matt Yglesias, David Brooks vs. the House Progressives

Brooks says the Ryan budget has the following main advantages over the CPC budget: High-income individuals will be less inclined to take vacations or retire and more inclined to work long hours. In a world where trade-offs are, to an extent, unavoidable, I don't see that as an enormously difficult choice.”

NEW YORK TIMES: EDITORIAL, Senate Democrats Finally Take a Stand

The proposal could have gone further. Under pressure from the false Washington “consensus” that the deficit is an immediate problem, the plan fails to spend enough on education or even on President Obama’s proposal for universal preschool. Unlike the budget from the Congressional Progressive Caucus, it does not call for higher tax rates on the rich, or for a bigger estate tax, or for taxing capital gains as ordinary income.

WASHINGTON POST: Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Progressives’ budget merits a closer look

“It doesn’t have to be that way. When all-too-savvy reporters dismiss reasonable ideas as doomed fantasies, they do the public a disservice. When they shower right-wing pseudo-wonkery with the air of seriousness, they make it that much worse. (There are praiseworthy exceptions to the trend, including the New York Times’ Paul Krugman and The Post’s Ezra Klein, who called the Progressive Caucus budget the “correct counterpart to the unbridled ambition of the Ryan budget.”)

This week, both budgets will likely get a vote in the House. The truth is, neither Ryan’s budget nor that of the Progressive Caucus stands a chance of being passed into law as is. But each is an attempt to shift U.S. policy — and national discussion — in a different direction. Since too much of the Inside the Beltway media keep treating Ryan’s budget as a serious blueprint, it falls to the rest of us to break open Washington’s all-too narrowly-framed debate."

WASHINGTON POST: Harold Meyerson, It’s not the left that’s changed, it’s the economy

 “In short, the economy is working for our economic elites. The massive changes they would have to make to investment strategies and the division of corporate revenue so that the economy workeHere it d for the majority of the American people are nowhere on the horizon. The great growth machine that once was the U.S. private sector ain’t what it used to be — which is one reason each recession since 1990 has been longer, deeper and more in­trac­table than the last. That’s the new economic reality in this country, and that’s what the budget of the Congressional Progressive Caucus responds to.”

Jamelle Bouie, Do Congressional liberals have the only “Serious” budget in Washington?

But unlike the Ryan plan — and more so than the plan produced by Senate Democrats — this plan deals with the real economic problems faced by millions of Americans. Unemployment under the Back to Work framework is projected to fall to 5 percent within three years — a swift return to pre-recession levels. Moreover, it achieves $4.4 trillion in deficit reduction, reaching (and surpassing) the target set by Alan Simpson and Erksine Bowles. Which is to say that by Washington’s standards, this should be seen as a “serious” document when it comes to deficit reduction.