The committee, she said, “sees this issue as important and pressing and we hope to do all that we can as a peace church to protect people in our community … according to our religious convictions, our constitutional rights and Lancaster County’s history of supporting immigrants.”
.. On Monday, White House Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney told reporters that part of the CBO report was “absurd,” and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price said, “We disagree strenuously with the report that was put out.”.. Hall, a conservative economist, responded to the email, Hoagland said, writing that “he was doing the job he’s paid to do.”.. Its analysis, for example, of the White House’s proposed tax cut plan could find that large reductions in corporate or individual tax rates could lead to a big spike in the deficit. It could also issue a report about the economic impact of building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border... “They appointed this person,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said. “He was supposed to be a conservative person. Unfortunately for Republicans, he’s also an honest person.”.. “I’m concerned about it, but let’s face it, this is a tough baby to take care of and there will be some people who are left out,” said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah). “There isn’t enough money in the world to cover everybody the way they’d like to be covered.”.. Hall was hand-picked for the CBO job in 2015 by congressional Republicans, including Price, who at the time was a GOP congressman from Georgia... The Obama administration routinely objected to CBO assessments, but it often challenged CBO’s methodology or forecast modeling and didn’t dismiss reports outright.
Trump to Ask for Sharp Increases in Military Spending, Officials Say
President Trump will instruct federal agencies on Monday to assemble a budget for the coming fiscal year that includes sharp increases in Defense Department spending and drastic enough cuts to domestic agencies that he can keep his promise to leave Social Security and Medicare alone
.. Mr. Trump will demand a budget with tens of billions of dollars in reductions to the Environmental Protection Agency and State Department
.. But this plan — a product of a collaboration between the Office of Management and Budget director, Mick Mulvaney; the National Economic Council director, Gary Cohn; and the White House chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon — is intended to make a big splash for a president eager to show that he is a man of action.
.. “They might not agree with everything you do, but people will respect you for doing what you said you were going to do,” said Jason Miller
.. Despite his lament that he was handed “a mess” by President Barack Obama, he inherited a low unemployment rate, a lack of international crises requiring immediate attention, and majorities in both houses of Congress.
.. Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, who was Mr. Obama’s first chief of staff, said in an interview Sunday night that Mr. Trump was trying to create a “sense of urgency
.. White House officials are operating under the assumption that the rate of the United States’ economic growth this year will be 2.4 percent
.. That is slightly ahead of current projections, but it’s well below the 3 percent to 4 percent growth that Mr. Trump promised during the campaign.
Paul Ryan: The Flimflam Man
the Ryan plan would reduce revenue by almost $4 trillion over the next decade. If you add these revenue losses to the numbers The Post cites, you get a much larger deficit in 2020, roughly $1.3 trillion.
.. And that’s about the same as the budget office’s estimate of the 2020 deficit under the Obama administration’s plans. That is, Mr. Ryan may speak about the deficit in apocalyptic terms, but even if you believe that his proposed spending cuts are feasible — which you shouldn’t — the Roadmap wouldn’t reduce the deficit. All it would do is cut benefits for the middle class while slashing taxes on the rich.
.. The Tax Policy Center finds that the Ryan plan would cut taxes on the richest 1 percent of the population in half, giving them 117 percent of the plan’s total tax cuts. That’s not a misprint. Even as it slashed taxes at the top, the plan would raise taxes for 95 percent of the population.
.. most of the alleged savings in the Ryan plan come from assuming zero dollar growth in domestic discretionary spending, which includes everything from energy policy to education to the court system. This would amount to a 25 percent cut once you adjust for inflation and population growth. How would such a severe cut be achieved? What specific programs would be slashed? Mr. Ryan doesn’t say.
.. After 2020, the main alleged saving would come from sharp cuts in Medicare, achieved by dismantling Medicare as we know it, and instead giving seniors vouchers and telling them to buy their own insurance.
.. There’s also the unwillingness of self-styled centrists to face up to the realities of the modern Republican Party; they want to pretend, in the teeth of overwhelming evidence, that there are still people in the G.O.P. making sense. And last but not least, there’s deference to power — the G.O.P. is a resurgent political force, so one mustn’t point out that its intellectual heroes have no clothes.
But they don’t. The Ryan plan is a fraud that makes no useful contribution to the debate over America’s fiscal future.
Amid Trump Controversies, Tax Overhaul’s Uncertain Path
Congressional Republicans say an ambitious plan is in the works, but obstacles remain
Nobody is quite sure what the White House position is, or when it will become clear. And the whole process is being slowed down by the struggle over whether and how to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which itself is bogged down in uncertainty.
.. Still, GOP leaders consider handling Obamacare first vital for procedural reasons. It’s necessary to resolve the costs and tax implications of the health plan to write a new budget. And under congressional rules a new budget plan is necessary to provide an umbrella under which a tax overhaul can be passed with a simple majority, thereby avoiding a potentially deadly Democratic filibuster in the Senate.