U.S. Rep. Steve King (R-Kiron) used a nationally-televised debate Saturday evening to praise a budget plan from U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), saying the country is “up against a very big problem” when it comes to the cost of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and the federal budget is growing so fast “it’s pretty hard to get a handle on what it all means.”

King made the comments at a debate between GOP presidential candidates Herman Cain and former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich on Saturday in Texas. King co-hosted the event, held by the Texas Patriots PAC, which focused on entitlement reform.

With entitlement programs making up more than half the budget, King said, it’s difficult to address the nation’s deficit without looking to reform those programs. He praised Ryan’s plan for taking the initiative to do just that, and noted his own battle to do away with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

“It is a very, very difficult task to be able to shrink this,” he said. “I tried to do so by cutting off all the funding to Obamacare. I didn’t get that done yet.”

King said his one-year-old granddaughter’s share of the national debt is near $50,000. And by the time she’s in 5th grade, he said, she’ll owe $88,000.

“To put that in perspective the average student loan debt upon leaving college is $24,000,” King said. “Can you imagine coming into the world owing Uncle Sam twice as much as you might owe as a college graduate to pay off her tuition?”

And King warned it’s only a matter of time until each person’s share of the national debt becomes hundreds of thousands of dollars, and said it’s going to take “grit, determination and support” from a number of groups to address the issue.

“I pray I live to see the day that we have deficit reduction in this federal government and I am hopeful that we will take a big step tonight on how to get there,” King said before handing the conversation over to Cain and Gingrich.

Our sister site, the Colorado Independent, reported that Obama was in full campaign mode as he told a Denver crowd that he intends to relieve economic distress without going through the gridlocked Congress.

Obama’s plan is for speeding up student loan repayment reforms passed last year but wasn’t scheduled to take effect until 2014. His executive order will lower the maximum percentage of income students will have to pay toward their student loans to 10 percent. After 20 years, the remaining debt will be forgiven. There is also a loan consolidation component to the plan.

The plan would help 1.6 million borrowers reduce their monthly payments, according to the White House. Another 5.8 million could benefit from the loan consolidation program. But the conditions of the plan are restricted. The Education Finance Council told Reuters that they were disappointed by the limited scope of the proposal.

“President Obama’s proposal, available to a limited group of students for a limited amount of time, does not address the real student loan problem: rising tuition and the lack of well-paying jobs,” a statement from Education Finance Council said.

Student advocacy groups told the Chronicle of Higher Education that they were thankful, considering the gridlocked political scene, for the new measures.

“The president is doing what he can with a paralyzed Congress,” said Richard T. Williams, a lobbyist with the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. “It might be a limp when we need a leap, but we need Congress to provide that leap.”

Sen. Al Franken commended the President on the proposal.

“I’ve traveled around Minnesota and have heard how much families are struggling to make ends meet, and I’m glad the president recognizes that people need this kind of relief now,” Franken said in a statement. “The cost of a college education shouldn’t bankrupt a family, and with our struggling economy, these reforms couldn’t come at a better time.”

U.S. Student loan debt has recently overtaken credit card debt. There is roughly $1 trillion in outstanding loans and this year’s crop of university graduates holds the highest average debt to date, the Colorado Independent reported.

Obama also touched on the economic impact of student loan debt.

“Other countries are hustling to out-educate us so they can out-compete us tomorrow. They want the jobs of the future. I want you to have those jobs. I want Americans to have those jobs. I want us to win the future. That means we should be doing everything we can to put a college education within reach for every American,” Obama said. “It’s never been more important, but let’s face it, it’s also never been more expensive.”

The president spoke about the debt he and his wife Michelle racked up as students. He said together they owed in excess of $100,000 in student loans when they married.

“We combined liabilities, not assets,” he joked.

John Tomasic contributed to this report.

Last week, a handful of House Republicans — including one Florida congressman — accidentally voted against a measure expressing disapproval of raising the country’s debt limit.

Though the vote initially seemed like a major change of heart for the GOP congressmen, they have since submitted statements to the congressional record, asking for their votes to be changed. Among the five to mistakenly vote “no” on H.J. Res. 77 was Florida Congressman Vern Buchanan, R-Sarasota.

Following his inadvertent vote on Wednesday, Buchanan submitted the following request: “Please let the permanent record reflect that I support H.J. Res. 77 and my vote should be recorded as ‘aye.’” A spokesperson told The New York Times that Buchanan “thought he had voted yes, until he found out otherwise.”

Because the votes had already been officially recorded, however, they will remain unchanged. Though the men have given no explanation as to why they mistakenly voted against the resolution (which passed the House in a  232-to-186 vote), some speculate that the men were simply used to voting “no” on anything related to the debt ceiling.

Some of those cuts include:

_ Subsidies for coal, gas and oil: Fossil fuel companies don’t need taxpayer subsidies because they’re highly profitable, the report argues.

Also for the chopping block, the report argues, is President Barack Obama’s proposed “clean energy standard,” which would mandate use of energy from renewable energy, nuclear, natural gas and “clean coal.” The report says it locks the nation into forms of polluting energy and would raise prices.

_ Nuclear loan guarantees: The report says that the industry is mature and should be able to attract its own investment…

_ Biofuels subsides: Get rid of the ethanol tax credit and the Renewable Fuels Standard, which mandates increasing use of biofuels, because biofuels should be allowed to compete in the market without government help, it argues.

It also would cut billions of dollars in subsidies for advanced biofuels and for capturing carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal and storing them underground.

The report also calls for cuts to farm subsidies and crop insurance, highway projects, federally-backed flood insurance, and the use of public lands for livestock, mining and timber.

In the run-up to the debt ceiling vote earlier this month, FRC president Tony Perkins penned a column urging cuts to government spending.

“It is easy to lose sight of the spiritual and moral implications of our current debt crisis,” Perkins wrote. “Christians must stand up against an immoral political regime which indebts us to such foreign powers as the anti-Christian Communist Chinese. Our leaders must cut spending, cut the debt, and end fiscal obligations to oppressive regimes.”

The group opposes an increase in tax revenues, especially allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire. The group has repeatedly decried “government waste.” And earlier this week in a “memo the movement,” the group launched an effort to pressure the “Super Committee,” a group of Congress members charged with reducing the federal deficit to cut programs instead of enacting “job-killing tax increases.”

But the group’s affiliates have raked in government funds for controversial programs such as abstinence-only until marriage and healthy-marriage initiatives over the past decade, state and federal records show.

The Family Action Council of Tennessee received $10,000 from the state of Tennessee to host anti-pornography workshop in 2008. FACT supports cutting government spending. They also insinuate that the poor should pay more. “It seems to me that a major problem in Washington is that right at 50 percent of Americans no longer pay federal taxes,” wrote the group’s head David Fowler.

“Sexually oriented businesses often prey upon urban communities and those located along interstate routes and major state highways, especially where there are few zoning restrictions,” the group said on the event invite. “Adult businesses are now pursuing their agenda through their own state association and have a lobbyist promoting their interests at the state Capitol. This is not an ‘industry’ your community can afford to ignore.”

The Georgia Family Council has received about $165,000 a year from the Georgia Department of Human Services as part of a healthy-marriage initiative. The initiative is funded through a five-year, $960,000 grant from the federal Administration on Children and Families to the state of Georgia. The grant began in 2005 and ran through June of this year.

The organization acknowledges some good from government programs, but its president Randy Hicks notes in a recent blog post, “Big government may also hinder compassionate collaboration at the community level when its ubiquitous, taxpayer-funded programs role into town and crowd out private charitable organizations who are working to meet, not just material needs, but often emotional and spiritual needs as well.”

The Oklahoma Family Policy Council, which closed in March of this year for lack of funds, took in $100,000 a year through 2008 beginning as recently as 2005.

The American Independent News Network has also previously identified government funding for family policy councils in Indiana, Iowa and South Carolina.

The Indiana Family Institute received $50,000 from the Administration for Children and Families in 2005.

The Iowa Family Policy Center is part of the FAMiLY Leader, a group that has become heavily involved in the Republican presidential race. The group received $3 million in federal funding between 2004 and 2011. The FAMiLY Leader asked presidential candidates to sign a pledge that included a “commitment to downsizing government.”

The Palmetto Family Council in South Carolina received $1.2 million between 2008 and 2010 as part of the Community-Based Abstinence Education Program through the Administration of Children and Families.

Some state affiliates gain access to state and federal funds more indirectly, as well.

The Wisconsin Family Council, now called Wisconsin Family Action, partnered with the Foundation for a Great Marriage under a healthy-marriage initiative grant in the late-2000s.

“We recently worked with Foundation for a Great Marriage to kick off a ‘Think Marriage’ campaign by mailing to nearly 90,000 Wisconsin households a ‘Marriage Myth-Buster Guide,’” wrote the group’s Julaine Appling. “This 14-page publication busts 5 common marriage myths to smithereens, based on solid social-science research—research that continues to show that God’s plan for marriage and family is the very best plan for all of us. The challenge is for each of us to become, as the guide says, a Marriage Champion! The ‘Marriage Myth-Buster Guides’ are especially useful because they can be used with so many audiences. Wisconsin Family Council has already received numerous requests from pastors who want to use it in their churches, public-school teachers who want to use it in their classrooms, and just last week we had an individual contact us about using it in a crisis pregnancy center.”

Foundation for a Great Marriage has also been blogging in support of WFC, particularly around an anti-gay marriage amendment in the state.

Both groups were part of a lobbying campaignin 2005 to get $200 million from the federal government for marriage initiatives. The Foundation for a Great Marriage got $5.5 million in federal marriage grants between 2006 and 2010. While Wisconsin Family Action benefited from government funds, it calls for cuts to programs in Wisconsin.

The Center for Arizona Policy received a $210,000 settlement with the state of Arizona in 2009. The state settled on an abortion-related case where some abortion clinic regulations enacted by the state were ruled constitutional and others ruled unconstitutional. CAP was allowed to recoup “operating expenditures, insurance and related charges, and gross proceeds and payments to attorneys.”

Correction, August 22, 4:00 p.m.: This article originally included Rocky Mountain Family Council as an FRC affiliate. RMFC is an independent organization not affiliated with FRC. The story has been updated to reflect these changes.

“The lawmakers I have appointed to serve on this joint committee are proven leaders who have earned the trust and confidence of their colleagues and constituents,” Boehner said. “They understand the gravity of our debt crisis and I appreciate their willingness to serve on this panel.”

Boehner named House Republican Conference Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) as co-chair of the committee.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) chose Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-AZ), and first term senators Rob Portman (R-OH) and Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA).

Senate Democrats will be represented on the committee by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT), John Kerry (D-MA) and Patty Murray (D-WA).

It is not yet clear who will represent House Democrats on the committee.

As in the past, Paul said the Republican plan for the national debt is all politics and no substance. “In spite of the rhetoric being thrown around, the real debate is over how much government spending will increase,” he wrote.

In reality, bringing our fiscal house into order is not that complicated or excruciatingly painful at all. If we simply kept spending at current levels, by their definition of “cuts” that would save nearly $400 billion in the next few years, versus the $25 billion the Budget Control Act claims to “cut”. It would only take us 5 years to “cut” $1 trillion, in Washington math, just by holding the line on spending. That is hardly austere or catastrophic.

Paul wistfully recalls the halcyon days of 2002, when the federal government spent just $2.2 trillion — “and the government was far from small that year” — compared to $3.7 million today.

We pay 35 percent more for our military today than we did 10 years ago, for the exact same capabilities. The same could be said for the rest of the government. Why has our budget doubled in 10 years? This country doesn’t have double the population, or double the land area, or double anything that would require the federal government to grow by such an obscene amount.

In Washington terms, a simple freeze in spending would be a much bigger “cut” than any plan being discussed. If politicians simply cannot bear to implement actual cuts to actual spending, just freezing the budget would give the economy the best chance to catch its breath, recover and grow.

In a separate statement on the debt ceiling deal, Paul further explained his opposition to the Republican deal, saying it was “good to see serious debate about our debt crisis,” but that “I have never voted to raise the debt ceiling, and I never will.”

Paul goes on:

This deal will reportedly cut spending by only slightly over $900 billion over 10 years. But we will have a $1.6 trillion deficit after this year alone, meaning those meager cuts will do nothing to solve our unsustainable spending problem. In fact, this bill will never balance the budget. Instead, it will add untold trillions of dollars to our deficit. This also assumes the cuts are real cuts and not the same old Washington smoke and mirrors game of spending less than originally projected so you can claim the difference as a ‘cut.’

The plan also calls for the formation of a deficit commission, which will accomplish nothing outside of providing Congress and the White House with another way to abdicate responsibility. In my many years of public service, there have been commissions on everything from Social Security to energy policy, yet not one solution has been produced out of these commissions.

Rather than leave things on such a down note in the midst of a presidential campaign, Paul closed with a message of hope, or something like it:

These difficult times require a President willing to stand against runaway spending. If elected, I will veto any spending bill that contributes to an unbalanced budget, and I will balance the budget in the first year of my term. I will not allow the Federal Reserve to destroy the value of our money by shoveling dollars into the pockets of its banker friends.

Expanding on his fiscal 2012 budget request, the president will spell out a four-step approach that includes cost savings in the defense budget, the tax code, domestic spending and health care spending.

Obama’s plan also incorporates recommendations from the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, including a tax reform package, which, according to Roll Call, involves “a tax cut for most people but allows many deductions to shrink or disappear.”

Obama is scheduled to speak at 1:35 p.m. EST. Watch the broadcast live on the White House website.

Instead, the debate hosted by Tucker Carlson and Grover Norquist at the National Press Club in Washington resembled a job interview. Candidates listed what “skills” they have for the position, how their past experiences would help them lead the RNC and how they would do the job (all interspersed with the occasional awkward joke). Their interlocutors repeatedly asked them to answer questions “specifically,” which they generally did not.

Though Norquist reminded the audience that there was “no job description,” being a party chair is really about one thing — raising money. The candidates all said how they could raise money to defeat President Obama in 2012. Priebus said he would spend “five or six” hours on the phone everyday with major donors, saying that the RNC needed to raise $400 million to defeat the president. “It’s all about fundraising,” said Anuzis in his opening.

“We don’t do policy, we do politics,” said Chairman Steele. “You don’t get to dictate the terms of policy to the (House) speaker, or the minority leader. If you get it wrong, You’ll be reminded, ‘you don’t do policy,’” he ended, drawing the loudest applause from the crowd for the chairman,

Steele, the center of debate, knows whereof he speaks. Soon after he was elected as RNC chairman, he said — in comments that were anathema to most Republicans — that abortion was an “individual choice” to be decided by the states in a May 2009 interview with GQ. In the debate, Steele — who is often animated on cable news shows — appeared subdued. According to a Politico report this morning, Steele does not have the votes from the 168-member RNC to stay on for a second term.

In the one exception to the lack of debate in the debate, Steele defended his record as RNC chairman when Wagner attacked his lack of funding for GOTV operations along the lines of a memo by former Steele aide — and former RNC candidate himself before dropping out — Gentry Collins. “We didn’t have 72-hour program — we had a 12-month program. We won 64 house seats, 21 state legislatures flipped.” He maintained that the program was done differently. “We won in all fifty states this year. And that’s the goal, winning. Find me a state that didn’t have a winning election.”

Despite the Republicans’ success in the midterm elections, the RNC is $15 million in debt; reports indicate that it has already spent lavishly for its 2012 convention in Tampa; and it has had to delay payment to convention vendors. Steele meekly suggested at the outset that the debt might be “refinanced” and the party would have to “hunker down, get the money right, get the dollars right.”

The race for RNC chair is of course, not an open election — 168 members choose the chairman in a race that often has multiple ballots — but Priebus appears to be the front-runner, according to vote counts. He also acted like it. He repeatedly spoke of the need to work with the conservative movement and the tea party. He also talked like a tea partier, sounding the alarm of American decline. “We are about to fall off a fiscal cliff,” he said in his opening. “We need to save our country, and in turn to save our party, and take back the White House,” he said, often repeating the need to “save our country” more than any other candidate.

Priebus also had huge success in normally-blue Wisconsin in 2010. Plastics magnate Ron Johnson won his first election, defeating Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold by painting him as a Washington insider. Longtime House Appropriations Chair David Obey (D-Wisc.) retired and his seat was taken by Republican Sean Duffy, who was previously a cast member on MTV’s “The Real World.” Wisconsin’s Republicans took over the governorship, both legislatures and picked up an additional U.S. House seat.

Ultimately, the RNC chairmanship race is shaping up a lot like the Republican narrative of the 2010 elections — Priebus, talking the language of the tea party, looks poised to defeat the fiscally-irresponsible incumbent Michael Steele on January 14.

Due to careful stewardship of the emergency programs, their effect on the deficit was much smaller than previously estimated. The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) had outlays of just $9.0 billion in FY 2010, which was $25.9 billion or 74 percent below previous estimates from July 2010. Aid to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was $52.6 billion in FY 2010 — $16.4 billion or 24 percent less than the most recent forecast.

This played a large part in reducing the deficit, which as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) fell to 8.9 percent, down from 10.0 percent of GDP in FY 2009. This improvement — 1.1 percent of GDP — was the most rapid one-year improvement since FY 1987.

The takeaway: TARP worked and Fannie and Freddie did not need as much as the Treasury thought. Therefore, the deficit came in smaller than expected, at $1.294 trillion. That’s nine percent smaller and $122 billion less than last year.

But a smaller deficit is not necessarily a good thing — not during times of sustained, 9.6 percent unemployment. Democrats and most economists actually wanted a much bigger deficit, indicating massive government spending to juice the economy in the face of low aggregate demand. (Keynes, in simplified English: Because regular consumers aren’t buying things, employers are cutting payrolls. If the government buys things, employers will start hiring, meaning more consumers can buy more things, putting the economy back on track.)

The report shows that the government spent billions less on stimulus programs than it intended to, for a variety of reasons. Here are a few examples, comparing what the government actually spent with what it thought it would spend mid-year. (MSR stands for the Mid-Session Review of the FY 2011 Budget, which came out in July.)

• The MSR included an allowance for jobs initiatives, which reduced expected receipts by $1 billion. Delay in enactment of a job creation package increased FY 2010 receipts $1 billion relative to the MSR.
• Actual outlays for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program were $2.1 billion lower than MSR estimates. Outlays for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) were also lower by roughly $1.2 billion, as actual WIC participation and food costs were lower than expected.
• Outlays for the Department of Commerce were $13.2 billion, $2.7 billion less than the MSR estimate. Three-fifths of the difference is due to favorable performance of the 2010 Decennial Census, including higher-than-expected workforce productivity and a higher-than-expected Census questionnaire mail-back response rate that reduced the need for costly non-response follow-up operations, resulting in no need to tap contingency funds set aside for disasters or major operational failures.
• Outlays for the Department of Labor were $172.9 billion in FY 2010, $7.8 billion less than the MSR estimate. Most of the difference was due to lower-than-expected spending on unemployment compensation benefits, including Emergency Unemployment Compensation.
• Outlays for the Department of Transportation were $77.8 billion, $7.7 billion lower than projected in the MSR. The surface transportation programs, which were $6.0 billion below MSR projections, were affected by uncertainty due to numerous short-term program authorization extensions. The largest difference was in the Federal Highway Administration, where Federal Aid Highway program outlays were $4.4 billion below the MSR projection. In addition, Federal Transit Administration program outlays were $1.4 billion below expected levels. For these two programs, short-term authorizations limited States’ ability to obligate funds in a timely manner.
• Outlays for the Child Tax Credit and Making Work Pay Credit were below MSR estimates by $1.8 billion and $2.4 billion, respectively, as the state of the economy generally reduced taxpayers’ eligibility for these credits. These below-MSR outlays were partially offset by COBRA program outlays nearly $3.1 billion above the MSR estimate.