Republican lawmakers were quick to shut down President Obama’s call Tuesday to spare the massive across-the-board spending cuts with a short term fix of spending reductions and revenue. “Until he addresses the real problem, which is mandatory spending, he's just whistling in the wind,” House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon told Politico Tuesday. The GOP has already made clear that they are done negotiating on taxes.
Instead, they’re telling Democrats that it’s their turn to deal with the sequester cuts. Immediately after the president’s remarks Tuesday, House Speaker John Boehner pointed out that the House already passed a bill to replace the spending cuts, and said the responsibility was now on Senate Democrats to come up with a solution. The House’s sequester replacement expired when the new Congress began, so they would have to take up the measure again, which House Republicans say they have no plans to do. - Read more at The Hill
DO DEFENSE CUTS REALLY AFFECT ECONOMIC GROWTH? Not really. The Fiscal Times’ David Francis examines defense spending drawbacks after World War II, the Vietnam War and the Cold War and found that “military drawdowns have not led to downturns in the economy.” Read more at The Fiscal Times
CBO: WE NEED $2 TRILLION MORE IN SAVINGS It will take at least $2 trillion more in budget belt-tightening over the next decade to narrow the federal debt and move it closer to historic levels, according to figures from the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO said if Congress does nothing to reign in the debt, it will eventually be 77 percent of GDP. 'At this level of debt relative to GDP, our country would be incurring costs and bearing risks of a sort that we have not [had] in our history except for a few years around the end of the second World War,” CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf told the Wall Street Journal. - Read more at The Wall Street Journal
