CBO Confirms GOP Budget Bill Triggers Medicare Cuts
Source: House Committee on the Budget
"WASHINGTON, DC — Congressman Brendan F. Boyle (PA-02), Ranking Member of the House Budget Committee, released the following statement after the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) warned that the Republican budget bill would trigger more than $500 billion in automatic cuts to Medicare under the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go (‘PAYGO’) Act:
“This Republican budget bill is one of the most expensive—and dangerous—bills Congress has seen in decades. The nonpartisan CBO makes it clear: the deficit will explode so badly it will trigger automatic cuts, including over half a trillion dollars from Medicare.
This is what Republicans do—pay for massive tax breaks for billionaires by going after programs families rely on the most: Medicaid, food assistance, and now Medicare. It’s reckless, dishonest, and deeply harmful to the middle class.”
As Republican holdouts are demanding even more cuts to health care, there is no reason to believe the members of the current Republican conference will disarm this budget time bomb."
Read more: https://democrats-budget.house.gov/news/press-releases/cbo-confirms-gop-budget-bill-triggers-medicare-cuts
= new reply since forum marked as read
short article, it can be broken.
Rep Boyle will be testifying tonight at 1 am, should be interesting.
https://www.cbpp.org/sites/default/files/atoms/files/policybasics-paygo.pdf
The “Pay-As-You-Go” Budget Rule
"The pay-as-you-go rule, also known as PAYGO, is designed to encourage Congress to offset the cost of any legislation that increases spending on entitlement programs or reduces revenues so it doesn’t expand the deficit. Under PAYGO, Congress must pay for such legislation by reducing other entitlement spending or increasing other revenues.
Congress and the President first established a PAYGO law in 1990 as part of a bipartisan budget summit agreement to reduce the large deficits the nation faced. It aimed to prevent future Congresses from reversing the tax increases and entitlement cuts both parties accepted as part of that agreement. PAYGO played a key role in helping reduce and then eliminate the deficit.
In the late 1990s, however, Congress and the President began waiving PAYGO in response to the booming economy and several years of budget surpluses. In 2001 they waived PAYGO enforcement and approved very large tax cuts without offsets — a sharp departure from PAYGO discipline. This set the stage for other PAYGO exceptions. In 2002 Congress allowed PAYGO to expire, facilitating the passage of deficit-increasing tax and entitlement legislation over the next several years, including the 2003 tax cuts and the Medicare prescription drug bill.
Partly because of the return of large deficits, Congress used its internal rules to reinstate the PAYGO principle in 2007. It decided to prohibit the consideration of legislation that would break the PAYGO principle. In 2010, Congress and the President also reestablished PAYGO as a law, very much like the 1990 law..."
