The budget debate

Tuesday, April 12, 2011 | 2:01 a.m.

Congress is scheduled to vote later this week on the deal struck late Friday that averted a government shutdown. The proposal, which would cut $38.5 billion in spending from the fiscal year that ends in September, will set the stage for a larger debate on spending over the coming months.

As it is, things don’t look terribly encouraging. Some conservative Republicans, pushed by the Tea Party, don’t think the proposal contains enough cuts and are demanding larger cuts.

Republican Rep. Mike Pence, an outspoken Tea Party supporter, praised House Speaker John Boehner for making what he said appeared to be a “good deal,” but he added that it is “probably not good enough for me to support.”

Therein is the real problem in Congress over the budget: For the ultraconservative wing of the Republican caucus, nothing is ever good enough. The stalemate over the most recent threatened government shutdown demonstrated that. Democrats negotiated and worked to find compromises. But House Republicans consider compromise a dirty word. If Democrats agreed to give in on something, conservatives wanted more, whether deeper cuts or policy changes.

The result was all of the drama that left the federal government hanging until late Friday as Boehner tried to soothe the Tea Party wing of his caucus. Republicans say they want to negotiate, but they only really want Democrats to acquiesce to their demands. If the nation is to address the deficit, that type of “negotiating” can’t continue. The nation needs to move forward and have an honest debate about the budget.

To that end, President Barack Obama is scheduled to lay out his budget plans in a speech Wednesday and is expected to call for a broad and bipartisan solution. Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, said Obama would build on the work of the federal debt commission, which in the report it released last year proposed a mix of spending cuts, reforms and tax increases.

However, instead of taking that type of approach to the deficit, conservative Republicans are rallying around a plan authored by Rep. Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman. Released last week, Ryan’s plan would be disastrous and would make the poor and the middle class bear the burden of cutting the nation’s debt. In future years, seniors on Medicare and those on federal health care insurance programs would pay significantly more — while the rich would get a lucrative tax break.

Despite the lavish praise from conservatives, Ryan’s plan isn’t workable. It is based on ridiculous projections and a foolish belief in trickle-down economics. Republicans have been disingenuous and hypocritical throughout the budget debate. It was just last year during the elections that Republicans attacked Democrats for allegedly making cuts to Medicare, and now the GOP’s hallmark plan would gut Medicare.

Republicans are stuck in their own ideology, and that is the wrong way forward. The nation needs a balanced approach toward cutting the deficit and everyone — including the rich — should share in the effort.