NYT editorial: The Budget Battles: Prosperity for Whom?

If the House Republican budget blueprint released on Tuesday is the “path to prosperity” that its title claims, it is hard to imagine what ruin would look like.

The plan would condemn millions to the ranks of the uninsured, raise health costs for seniors and renege on the obligation to keep poor children fed. It envisions lower taxes for the wealthy than even George W. Bush imagined: a permanent extension for his tax cuts, plus large permanent estate-tax cuts, a new business tax cut and a lower top income tax rate for the richest taxpayers.

Compared to current projections, spending on government programs would be cut by $4.3 trillion over 10 years, while tax revenues would go down by $4.2 trillion. So spending would be eviscerated, mainly to make room for continued tax cuts.

The deficit would be smaller, but at an unacceptable cost. Health care would be hardest hit, followed by nonsecurity discretionary spending — the sliver of the budget that encompasses annually appropriated programs. Those include education, scientific research, environmental preservation, investor protection, disease control, food safety, federal law enforcement and other areas that bear directly on the quality of Americans’ daily lives. The proposed cuts in such programs are $923 billion deeper than President Obama called for in his 2012 budget, which pushed the edge of what is politically possible.

(More here.)