President Barack Obama has yet to release his federal budget plan for the upcoming year — he will do that next week — but House Speaker John Boehner has already determined that what he’s seen from media reports does not go far enough. He asserts that Obama’s budget will never balance and it blocks entitlement reform by insisting on new tax revenues.
“At some point we need to solve our spending problem, and what the president has offered would leave us with a budget that never balances,” Boehner said in a statement . “In reality, he’s moved in the wrong direction, routinely taking off the table entitlement reforms he’s previously told me he could support.”
Following the November election, Congress returned the tax rate for high-income households to the 39.6 rate of the 1990s , before the Bush tax cuts dropped the rate to 35 percent in the 2000s. Boehner has since insisted that the president got his tax hikes on the wealthy without following through with spending cuts.
“When the president visited the Capitol last month, House Republicans stated a desire to find common ground and urged him not to make savings we agree upon conditional on another round of tax increases,” Boehner continued. “If reports are accurate, the president has not heeded that call. If the president believes these modest entitlement savings are needed to help shore up these programs, there’s no reason they should be held hostage for more tax hikes. That’s no way to lead and move the country forward.”
The budget would lower annual spending increases made to various government programs , including Social Security. Democrats are not fans of the cuts to entitlements made in the proposal. Obama’s federal budget plan appeases Democrats by continuing to call for additional tax revenue, but according to Boehner, enough is enough.
[Image by Gage Skidmore (Flickr: John Boehner) [ CC-BY-SA-2.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons ]