Budget talks: Republicans offer to seek common ground
with Democrats
By Lori Montgomery, Wednesday,
May 4 , 9:20 PM
Senior Republicans conceded Wednesday that a deal is unlikely on a contentious
plan to overhaul Medicare and offered to open budget
talks with the White House by focusing on areas where both parties can
agree, such as cutting farm subsidies.
On the eve of debt-reduction talks led by Vice President Biden, House
Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Va.) said Republicans remain convinced that reining
in federal retirement programs is the key to stabilizing the nationfs finances
over the long term. But he said Republicans recognize they may need to look
elsewhere to achieve consensus after President
Obama gexcoriated ush for a proposal to privatize Medicare.
That search should start, Cantor said, with a list of GOP proposals that
would save $715 billion over the next decade by ending payments to wealthy
farmers, limiting lawsuits against doctors, and expanding government auctions of
broadcast spectrum to telecommunications companies, among other items.
Democrats said they were encouraged by the move, which could smooth the way
to a compromise allowing Congress to raise
the legal limit on government borrowing and avoid a national default.
gTherefs common ground there,h said Rep. Chris Van Hollen (Md.), the senior
Democrat on the House Budget Committee, who is representing House Democrats in
the Biden talks.
The conciliatory tone signals the opening of a new and more consequential
phase in the battle to design an affordable government for an aging society.
After months of partisan brinkmanship over comparatively small cuts to the
current budget, lawmakers returned to Washington this week to confront the
harder problem of reducing a
national debt that has risen to alarming levels.
They face a tight deadline: Without congressional action, the debt will hit
the legal limit of $14.3 trillion in the next two weeks. Treasury Secretary
Timothy F. Geithner has said he can juggle the books and pay the bills through
Aug. 2. But at that point, the U.S. government would risk a default on its
obligations and economic disaster.
Congressional leaders in both parties are eager to avoid that outcome and are
dispatching representatives to the Biden talks to try to hash out a
debt-reduction accord that would make it easier for lawmakers to cast a
politically difficult vote for additional borrowing.
Even the more austere spending plan drafted by House Budget Committee
Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and approved last month by the House would require
an increase in the debt ceiling of about $1.9 trillion to cover the
governmentfs bills through September 2012.
With voters growing increasingly anxious about the debt, Republicans and some
Democrats are refusing to approve additional borrowing without an explicit
strategy to reduce deficit spending. Raising the debt limit will be particularly
difficult in the House, where the Republican majority is dominated by
conservatives who have vowed to oppose any additional borrowing.
In the Biden talks, Cantor said House Republicans will be looking for an
agreement that includes three elements: spending cuts in the fiscal 2012 budget,
which covers the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1; enforceable targets that would
require Congress to continue racheting down spending in future years; and action
by the end of this year on legislation that would begin to meet those
targets.
gWe donft want to rely solely on caps and targets. We want to take action
now,h Cantor said, noting that budget controls have too often been waived when
lawmakers have found them difficult to meet.
The immediate action, Cantor said, should involve cuts to mandatory programs,
which make up the largest portion of the budget and are not funded through
annual appropriations. For such programs, the government is obliged to provide
benefits to all who qualify regardless of the cost.
The biggest mandatory programs — often called gentitlementsh — are Medicare,
Medicaid and Social Security. But Cantor said negotiators could avoid the gbig
three,h which Democrats have vowed to defend, by focusing on changes in other
areas.
gIf we can come to some agreement [and] act to effect those savings now, this
year, it will yield a lot of savings in subsequent years,h he said.
At a breakfast for reporters hosted by Bloomberg News, Ryan said his budget
offers a gmenu of options . . . that I think we could get that are
not necessarily the global agreement on, say, Medicare or Social Security.h That
menu includes a number of proposals from Obamafs budget request, such as ending
grants for worsted-wool producers and requiring graduate students to pay
interest on their college loans while they are still in school.
Other options would be less palatable to Democrats. Ryan has proposed
slashing $127 billion from the food-stamp program, which was expanded
during the recent recession. He has also suggested cutting contributions to
federal worker pension plans and eliminating the new Consumer Financial
Protection Bureau, a centerpiece of recent legislation overhauling financial
regulations.
Still, the offer suggests that Republicans and Democrats are engaging in the
same exercise, scouring the proliferation of debt-reduction plans in hopes of
cobbling together enough mutually acceptable ideas to cut a deal.
As talks progress, Van Hollen said Democrats will insist on scrutinizing the
tax code just as thoroughly. One fat target for savings, he said, is tax breaks
for major oil producers.
gWe still want the overall approach to be a balanced oneh that does not focus
just on spending cuts, he said.
Cantor dismissed tax hikes as a gnon-starter,h saying raising taxes without
changes to the big entitlement programs would simply delay the day of
reckoning.
gWe want to be there with a safety net for people who need it. But what wefve
seen over the years is a country that has turned much more into an entitlement
country for people who donft need it,h Cantor said. gThat is the fundamental
question at stake here.h
© 2011 The Washington Post Company