Conrad rewrites the Obama budget w/o the goodies

Politico:

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad outlined a five-year spending plan Wednesday that would narrow the deficit by two-thirds but severely weaken President Barack Obama’s ability to achieve the tax cuts and health care reform at the heart of his domestic agenda.

Conrad’s proposed revenue numbers make no commitment to Obama’s signature Making Work Pay tax break. And in the case of health care, there is no specified down payment to match the $634 billion, 10-year number included in the president’s budget.

Even in the case of Pell Grants for low-income students, Conrad would keep the funding subject to annual appropriations and not shift to the more expansive mandatory funding status proposed by the college president.

The chairman said he believes sufficient money will remain to meet the president’s target for the Pell program. But that would appear difficult, since he is assuming significant cuts elsewhere from the president’s overall appropriations request.

For example, $15 billion would be taken from non-defense spending requests for the new fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. And over the full five years of the budget, he would scale back the administration’s requests by more than $160 billion.

All these adjustments allow Conrad to show a steep downward path for the deficit from the estimated $1.7 trillion shortfall forecast for this year by the Congressional Budget Office. The North Dakota Democrat hopes to have the number down to $601 billion by 2012, $570 billion in 2013 and, finally, $508 billion in 2014.

In each case, these would be lower deficits than those under Obama’s budget, as scored by the Congressional Budget Office last week. And the $508 billion target in 2014 is more than 30 percent less than the $749 billion for the president in the comparable fifth year.

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At his press conference, Obama appeared oblivious to these changes and refused to answer questions that asked if he would veto the budget if it did not include his goodies.

I thought he was pretty boring at the presser. I am not sure his true believers were excited about this. Karl Rove in his analysis talked noted the politics of fraud where he repeated things that just are not sued.