Last week the House voted 219-205 to approve the budget resolution for fiscal year 2015 drafted by Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan, who chairs the House Budget Committee. The bad news is that the House has once again gone on record in support of a budget plan that would make dramatic cuts in programs that promote and protect the health, education, and safety of children, especially for kids in low-income families.

The good news is that there is no way the House plan will be approved by the Senate. Because there will be a stalemate between the two houses of Congress, the spending levels for FY 2015 will be those approved in the House-Senate agreement that was adopted last December. (Although the primary focus of that bill was FY 2014, it also included a fallback plan for FY 2015, which begins on October 1 of this year.)

Even though the Ryan budget isn’t going to become law in the next year or so, the ideas in his plan aren’t going to go away. Because we will probably see similar measures proposed next year for the FY 2016 budget, it’s important to understand the effects of the House version of 2015 budget. For that reason, I provide the links below to a number of publications by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) summarizing the severe problems that would be caused by the budget plan developed by Rep. Ryan:

• Ryan Budget Gets 69 Percent of Its Cuts from Low-Income Programs
• Ryan Block Grant Proposal Would Cut Medicaid by More than One-Quarter by 2024 and More after That
• Ryan Budget Mischaracterizes Housing Vouchers, Then Sets the Stage to Cut Them
• Ryan Budget Would Slash SNAP by $137 Billion Over Ten Years: Low-Income Households in All States Would Feel Sharp Effects
• Ryan Budget a Path to Adversity for Millions — and Maybe for the Economy Too

All of those analyses and a few others are summarized in this CBPP paper: Ryan Roundup 2014: Everything You Need to Know about Chairman Ryan’s Latest Budget.

Rep. Ryan responded to the CBPP analysis by contending that they were overestimating the cuts.  A subsequent CBPP blog post (Chairman Ryan’s Response to the Center’s Analysis Doesn’t Hold Water) explains why his argument is wrong and why it’s also inconsistent with his own claims about the size of the spending reductions.

Jon Peacock