Paul Ryan and his Republican colleagues are driving discretionary spending, while President Barack Obama’s proposals for higher taxes and higher spending have not come to fruition, the Washington Times reports.
Three years into that budget showdown, Mr. Ryan and his Republican colleagues are winning. Government spending has slowed, and Mr. Obama’s plans for higher taxes and higher spending have fallen by the wayside.
"The discretionary spending has in fact been driven by Republicans post-2010 clamping down," said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office who is now president of the conservative-leaning American Action Forum. "It shows up in the sequester caps and all those things, and it tracks Republicans a lot more closely."
Mr. Ryan’s first budget, released soon after he took control of the Budget Committee in 2011, called for the federal government to spend slightly less than $3.59 trillion this year and take in just under $3.09 trillion in taxes. In reality, the CBO says the government is poised to spend $3.52 trillion and collect $3.03 trillion in 2014, meaning the Wisconsin Republican was off by about $50 billion or $60 billion.
In his own budget that year, Mr. Obama said that by 2014 the government should be spending nearly $4 trillion and taking in $3.33 trillion in taxes. Both projections are off by hundreds of billions of dollars.
Ryan’s budgets have not been adopted in full, but his proposals are coming closer to their mark than the president’s.