White House spokesman Jay Carney said Tuesday that House GOP Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) blueprint for next year’s spending is fundamentally unfair.
“It fails the test of balance, and balance is essential,” Carney told reporters at a briefing.
The comments come one day before President Obama plans to give a landmark speech on his vision for reducing the nation’s deficit and cutting long-term spending.
Carney repeatedly refused to preview the President’s speech by giving even the vaguest details about what it would contain. Instead, he said only that Obama believes the approach must be “balanced” and contain “all three legs of a balanced stool” — changes to “entitlements, tax expenditures and defense spending.”
Under Ryan’s plan, Medicare, the federal health insurance program for seniors and people with disabilities, would be turned over to private insurers and would likely end up costing beneficiaries more money or give them fewer services. Ryan’s plan would create block grants to states for Medicaid, the health care plan for low-income people that is now run jointly with the federal government.
Obama and Ryan are only in agreement about the shared goal of tackling long-term spending and reducing deficits, Carney said. When asked if the President thought Ryan’s budget is fundamentally unfair, Carney responded with one word: “Yes.”
“The house GOP plan demonstrates a shared goal with the President — that we need to take serious action to reduce the deficit,” Carney said. “What it doesn’t demonstrate is the kind of balance that the President believes we have to employ.”
Obama has invited congressional leaders to his office Wednesday morning for a preview of the speech he’ll make at George Washington University at 1:30 p.m.
“The President will lay out a vision and that vision will be clear and vivid tomorrow,” Carney said.
The White House also disputed reports that claimed last week’s 11th-hour budget deal that produced historic annual spending cuts would hurt the economic recovery by leading to more job losses.
Those reports, he said, were simply “not based on sound economics.”
During intense budget negotiations last week, Obama held fast to the principle that, “we must not do anything that harms our recovery.”
“We clawed and scratched our way out of the biggest recession since the Great Depression and we should not do anything that affects that,” he said.
