Senate's extremist balanced budget amendment worse than the one defeated in the House

[ProSense]

Senate's extremist balanced budget amendment worse than the one defeated in the House

by Meteor Blades

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Just how awful this amendment would be if it (or a future version) were enacted is detailed in a new report by Richard Kogan and Kelsey Merrick at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The amendment would first require balance in the budget of the 2018 fiscal year. The cap, the authors call it "severe" would require cutting all federal programs an average of one-fourth. Just how extreme is it?

Strikingly, even the budget plan that House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan designed and the House passed in April would not come close to passing muster under the Senate BBA. The Ryan plan, with its $4.5 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years, would not achieve balance until sometime in the 2030s, according to the Congressional Budget Office. And the spending levels in the Ryan budget resolution would breach the Senate BBA’s cap by $2.8 trillion over the four-year period 2018-2021. Even the more draconian House Republican Study Committee budget—which, by 2021, would cut funding for non-defense discretionary programs by 70 percent and cut basic low-income programs like Medicaid, SNAP, and Supplemental Security Income for the elderly and disabled poor in half—would breach the Senate’s BBA cap by almost $300 billion in 2018 and $1.1 trillion from 2018 through 2021.

Some highlights:

• Social Security would be cut $266 billion in 2018 alone and almost $1.7 trillion through 2021.

• Medicare would be cut $169 billion in 2018 and almost $1.1 trillion through 2021.

• Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program would be cut $115 billion in 2018 and more than $700 billion through 2021.

• Veterans’ disability payments, pensions, and other entitlement benefits would be cut $19 billion in 2018 and $123 billion through 2021.

• Key safety-net programs—Supplemental Security Income (SSI) for the elderly and disabled poor, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly food stamps), the school lunch and other child nutrition programs, and the refundable portions of the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit—would be cut $59 billion in 2018 and almost $370 billion through 2021.

• Appropriations for non-defense discretionary programs—the part of the budget that includes education, housing, veterans’ medical care, transportation, law enforcement, biomedical and other scientific research, environmental protection, and others—would be cut more than $140 billion in 2018 and almost $900 billion through 2021. These cuts, combined with cuts already scheduled under current law, would shrink this part of the budget to 2.0 percent of GDP, the smallest percentage since 1930.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/12/07/1043115/-Senates-extremist-balanced-budget-amendment-worse-than-the-one-defeated-in-the-House