On Tuesday, Paul Ryan, Chairman of the House Budget Committee, released his proposed Fiscal Year 2015 budget, which increases spending in 2015 and 2016 but would balance the budget within ten years with planned cuts in out years that are more speculative.
Leaders of the Tea Party movement around the country reacted to Ryan’s budget with derision, calling it a work of fiction.
Judson Phillips, founder of Tea Party Nation, told Breitbart News “Ryan’s budget should be found in the book store in the fiction department. If there is one thing we know about Washington, increased spending now with the promises of spending cuts on the future means we will get the spending but never the cuts.”
Phillips had a message for Ryan. “Why don’t we reverse the order? Spending cuts now and maybe spending increases in ten years. “
Ben Cunningham, founder of the Nashville Tea Party, told Breitbart News it is fitting that Ryan released his budget on April Fool’s Day. “On this day when we celebrate fools, we are once again presented with a budget by Republicans and asked to believe it is something more than a political document,” Cunningham said.
“If Republicans are serious about avoiding national bankruptcy they will stop appropriating nonexistent funds for $400,000 camel statues. Until then WE are the fools if we trust but do not verify,” Cunningham added.
Mark Kevin Lloyd, a Virginia Tea Party activist, was equally dubious. “I got tired of watching Popeye reruns when I was a kid in the ’60s,” he told Breitbart News. “Wimpy was always asking for a hamburger today, and offering to pay next Tuesday. That is exactly what this budget does for us.”
“The sad fact is that the promised reductions never come,” Lloyd said.”Future congresses are not bound by the dreams, schemes, and chicanery of previous congresses. These people think the American people are stupid, and the fact that we keep letting them get away with it makes me believe they might be right.”
The Tea Party message to cut spending now is not one Ryan embraced when he put together his proposed Fiscal Year 2015 budget, which authorizes federal spending for the period beginning October 1, 2014 and ending September 30, 2015. Ryan’s new budget increases spending by $166 billion from the $3.498 trillion Congress said it would spend in Fiscal Year 2015 when it passed the Fiscal Year 2014 budget. It also increases spending in Fiscal Year 2016 by $26 billion from the what was planned in the Fiscal Year 2014 budget.
Though both the Fiscal Year 2014 budget and the Fiscal Year 2015 budget claim to balance the budget in ten years, “out year” expenditures have historically increased, rather than decreased.