Budget Is Two Monthâ??s Late And More Of The Same

Washington, D.C. - After a two month delay and missing the legal deadline, President Barack Obama today submitted his Fiscal Year (FY) 2014 Budget to Congress.  Idaho Senator Mike Crapo, a member of the U.S. Senate Budget and Finance Committees, expressed disappointment and frustration with the proposal sent from the White House. 

"This is the fourth time in five years that this administration has submitted a late budget to Congress," Crapo noted.  "There is no business or family in Idaho that would operate this way and neither should the White House.  The U.S. House and Senate have already completed the process of marking up, debating, amending and passing budgets, and while I did not support the plan passed by the Senate, the two budgets should go to conference to address the differences.

"My commitment to work with the President remains unchanged, but this budget, filled with trillions of dollars in tax hikes and new spending, will continue to be a drag on an already anemic economy that is struggling to produce jobs.  Just like the Senate majority party's budget, this proposal does nothing to address our debt crisis and is not balanced.  This plan will actually add over eight trillion in new debt, while the deficit reduction only amounts to $119 billion.  This year alone will be the fourth year of trillion dollar deficits.

"While there is much in the plan to disagree with, the President does begin to acknowledge the need for entitlement reform with a proposal to allow for a more accurate measure for inflation.  This update will result in modest savings and improvements in the solvency of Social Security and other mandatory programs that are on the verge of insolvency.  Our entitlement programs, the real drivers of our debt, are unsustainable absent real change.  The change proposed by the President, which was supported by the bipartisan Bowles-Simpson Commission on which I served, should be considered a modest down payment on the significant structural entitlement reforms that must still take place in order to prevent key programs like Medicare and Social Security from being insolvent within a generation."