Budget

Robert Gates has gone to extraordinary lengths to circumvent early lobbying of Capitol Hill by the powerful defense industry.

The Republican alternative budget, introduced this morning by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), is here. It has cost analyses and projections, unlike the widely panned “blueprint” released last week by House GOP leaders, and it’s unfortunate for Ryan that the previous botched press conference stole his thunder. But there are problems here, too, such as Ryan’s [...]

An anonymous official quoted in Politico’s story on the House GOP budget plans said, “We need to hold something up and say, ‘Here are our charts. Here are our graphs. It’s real.” Here’s one of the charts (after the jump):

Ryan Grim reports from the House Republicans’ press conference to launch their alternative budget plan, which was previewed on page A-1 of Politico today as a “detailed alternative to President Barack Obama’s policies” and “a big, TV-friendly stack of blueprints.” From Grim:
“Two nights ago, the president said, ‘We haven’t seen a budget yet out of [...]

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) just gave an address on “generational theft” at the Heritage Foundation and semi-endorsed Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s plan for purchasing toxic assets from financial institutions. “It’s progress,” McCain said, generating a few sighs in the packed room. He opposes any more TARP money going out without more oversight, but wants to [...]

President Obama made headlines last month when he announced a budget wishlist eliminating a number of budget gimmicks used by Washington policymakers to, in effect, purposefully lie to the country about how much the government will collect and spend.
Breaking from previous administrations, Obama’s budget acknowledged that fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will actually [...]

Politico gets the early read and the early spin on the House Republicans’ alternative budget plan, focusing on the spin. We don’t know what’s in it, but we know it’s a “TV-friendly stack of budget blueprints.” And while Mike Allen and Victoria McGrane get Republican leaders to talk about how many ideas they’ve presented, and [...]

In a call with reporters this morning, Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag conceded that cap-and-trade climate legislation would not be included in the federal budget, after congressional Democrats made cuts to the president’s budget proposal yesterday.
Orszag noted, however, that the Making Work Pay tax credit to low-income households — to be raised [...]

The Congressional Budget Office has conducted an analysis of President Obama’s budget proposal and now projects a $1.8 trillion deficit this year, up from a $1.2 trillion projection in January.
“As estimated by CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation, the President’s proposals would add $4.8 trillion to the baseline deficits over the 2010–2019 period,” CBO [...]

Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag — who was as involved as anyone with the drafting of the budget outline President Obama rolled out this morning — just held a conference call with progressive media outlets and bloggers, and I took the opportunity to ask him about cap-and-trade in the budget.
He explained the [...]