chairman, welcome back to meet the press. great to be back with you. let s talk about this top priority of the budget battle. it will really mark the beginning of the president s second term. the debt ceiling has been raised, at least temporarily, but there are still big decisions to be made. you specifically said in the last few days that your priority is to make a big down payment on the debt. a debt crisis that you see in this country. that s right. what do you specifically require? what s the priority? what has the president got to do in your point of view? i ll just explain what the speaker said when we passed that bill. our goal is to get cuts and reforms that put us on a path to balancing the budget in a decade. we think the senate ought to offer a budget. they haven t passed a budget in four years, even though we have a law that says we need a budget every year. we haven t seen any solutions offered by the president on how to get the budget balanced, pay down the de
entitlement reforms like social security. when these statistics get cited, it leads you to think that america is gone, that we re becoming too much of a dependent culture. my point has always been, that s not the whole picture. here is the criticism against you. and it was written about in the new york magazine blog this week, which goes to whether you want to expand the base of the party. here s what he writes. obama is arguing that misfortune can strike americans in all forms. a disability, a storm, illness, or merely outliving our savings. we have some obligation to each other. ryan s budget imposes savage cuts to food stamps, children s health insurance, and other mitigations of suffering for the least fortunate. and ryan also voted against relief for victims of hurricane sandy. by ryan s definition, if the government is rebuilding your destroyed home, you re a taker too. look, this is a straw man argument. the president said earlier that we had suspicions about medicare and
we need to figure out how to grow the economy, how to get opportunity. and if we have a debt crisis like they had in europe, everybody gets hurt. that s what we want to avoid. last week, senator schumer said, we ll do a budget. great. finally. it s been four years. but this is what he said has to be in it. you re going to need more revenue as well as more cuts to get the deficit down. i ve talked to leader reid. budget chair murray. we re going to do a budget this year, and it s going to have revenues in it. and our republican colleagues better get used to that. so this is still a fight between how much spending cuts and how much taxes. the president got his well, simpson-bowles said let s get rid of the high tax rates. the president doesn t seem to be in favor of that mpt you had $1 trillion in tax increases with obama care.
he just got new tax increases at the beginning of this month. and now they are calling for even more tax increases, and they are not calling to cut spending. they are calling for spending increases. so basically what they re saying is, they want americans to pay more so washington can spend more. that s not going to help the economy, and that is not going to close the gap and balance the budget. the reason we want to balance the budget is not to make the numbers add up. we think that s necessary for growth and opportunity. we think it s necessary to make sure that our kids don t get this debt that they won t be able to handle if we keep going down the path we are on. but there are certainly those in the white house who would take issue with what you said or might even say to use your own criticism that s a straw man argument. they were prepared to cut additional spending to be part of a bigger agreement that republicans weren t able to agree to. there is more room for spending cuts.
savage, that i think does a disservice to the quality of the debate we need to have. what we re trying to achieve is a system where you have that safety net to help people who cannot help themselves, but you have an opportunity of society, education reform, economic growth, so that people can get on their feet and make the most of their lives and reach their potential. and that s what we re worried about losing in this country. one more on the budget. then a couple of other things. do you think there s a failure to get to know each other in washington, really get to know each other? you haven t had much contact with the president over the last couple of years. somebody pointed out to me something i thought was smart, which was solving the problem on the budget is not complicated. winning politically and solving the problem, that s hard. and that s what both sides seem to be locked into trying to do. well, i don t think that the president thinks we actually have a fiscal crisis. he