Paul Ryan asks the White House: ‘Why did you duck?’ on debt

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan told President Obama’s budget director Tuesday that the president squandered a prime opportunity to deal with the country’s “crippling burden of debt” with his budget proposal for 2012. 

Ryan (R-Wis.) said he would have rejected the budget plan released on Monday even if it had come from a Republican president. 

“If George Bush brought us this budget I would say the exact same thing: why did you duck?” Ryan asked White House budget director Jack Lew at a hearing. “Why did you not take this opportunity to lead?

Ryan kept up his assault on the president’s budget request at a hearing Tuesday morning with White House budget director Jack Lew. 

“Because we face a crippling burden of debt, this year’s budget in particular presented the president with a unique opportunity to lead our country,” Ryan told Lew. “The president has disappointed us all by declining that opportunity.”

Obama’s $3.7 trillion budget claims to reduce deficits by $1.1 trillion over 10 years, but it does not tackle entitlement or overall tax reform and it does not project a truly balanced budget in the next 10 years.

Lew said Obama has called the budget a down payment and acknowledged that more needs to be done in the long term to balance the budget. 

“There is more work ahead of us,” Lew said.

Ryan said he does not buy the administration’s economic growth assumptions of 4 percent GDP growth by 2013, the same year when Obama would raise taxes on small businesses and the wealthy.

{mosads}Lew replied that the top tax rate was higher in the Clinton administration and it was not damaging to the robust economic growth of the 1990s.

The White House budget director said the budget achieves “primary balance” by 2017. This refers to a balance budget when interest payments on the debt are excluded.

Lew called the budget a “tough love” budget that cuts programs cherished by Democrats.

“If was the tough love that my father showed me when I was young, I’d still be a juvenile delinquent,” Rep. Mike Simpson [R-Idaho] said.

He asked Lew why it does not ever achieve true balance. Lew noted that when he was President Clinton’s budget director, he brought Congress a balanced budget but poor choices over the last decade brought on record deficits.

House Budget Committee ranking member Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) used the hearing to contrast Obama’s approach to that of House Republicans who are looking to slash at least $61 billion in discretionary spending this year.

He praised the Obama budget for ending tax breaks for oil companies.

“There is no reason to subsidize those companies and shortchange investments in education and Head Start as our colleagues are attempting to do today on the House floor,” he said.

He noted that the fiscal commission, which Ryan said Obama should have done more to embrace, said that immediate cuts before 2012 could jeopardize the economic recovery.

Van Hollen noted that when the Congressional Budget Office last year scored Ryan’s own “roadmap” for dealing with the deficit, it found the plan did not achieve “primary balance” until 2024, later than the president’s budget.