According to this Yahoo News piece:
Responding to a challenge from President Barack Obama, House GOP leaders are offering up a roster of more than $23 billion in spending cuts over the next five years.
At first, I thought I had misread this number. It couldn’t be just $23 billion in cuts over five years. Then, I thought it was typo. But, no, it wasn’t a mistake. Obviously, $5 billion in cuts this year is a serious improvement over the president’s request that Cabinet secretaries produce $100 million worth of commonsense cuts this year. Yet, it’s far from the budget cuts Republicans proposed back in the 1990s in the Contract with America.
In addition, the Republican proposals also include some budget reforms such as:
- Non-Defense Spending Limits
- Commission To Review Government Spending
- Require New Programs To Be Paid For
- Opportunity to Review Legislation
Finally, they also asked that all returned bailout funds are used to reduce the deficit, not recycled into other bailouts.
According to Yahoo News:
Some of the GOP cuts haven’t been estimated by federal scorekeepers and the party has padded its own estimate by assuming $317 billion over the next five years from limiting non-defense agency budgets to inflation-adjusted levels that Obama is sure to reject.
The whole thing here.
For the complete list of cuts and proposals go here.
If you assume that spending limits are the equivalent of cuts, which they aren’t, we are talking about a $63 billion a year out of a $3,500 billion budget. I guess it’s a start, but it won’t get us anywhere if they don’t come up with a better plan. Seriously, without proposing the elimination of entire departments, which seems impossible to achieve in one sitting, can’t they come up with a list that would cut at least $200 billion a year? Corporate welfare alone is roughly $90 billion a year. Can Republicans get back some of that fire they had in the 1990s?