Obama calls Republican budget plan "radical"

Obama's evaluation of the Republican budget proposal crafted by Rep. Ryan. Here is part of the transcript from Obama's presentation to Facebook. The Republican plan will still increase the deficit by $5.8 trillion. Obama's plan will probably increase it by at least $9.4 trillion, though there has been much specifics lacking in his proposal.

The Republican budget that was put forward I would say is fairly radical. I wouldn’t call it particularly courageous. . . .

Their basic view is that no matter how successful I am, no matter how much I’ve taken from this country -- I wasn’t born wealthy; I was raised by a single mom and my grandparents. I went to college on scholarships. There was a time when my mom was trying to get her PhD, where for a short time she had to take food stamps. My grandparents relied on Medicare and Social Security to help supplement their income when they got old.

So their notion is, despite the fact that I’ve benefited from all these investments -- my grandfather benefited from the GI Bill after he fought in World War II -- that somehow I now have no obligation to people who are less fortunate than me and I have no real obligation to future generations to make investments so that they have a better.

So what his budget proposal does is not only hold income tax flat, he actually wants to further reduce taxes for the wealthy, further reduce taxes for corporations, not pay for those, and in order to make his numbers work, cut 70 percent out of our clean energy budget, cut 25 percent out of our education budget, cut transportation budgets by a third. I guess you could call that bold. I would call it shortsighted.

And then, as I said, there’s a fundamental difference between how the Republicans and I think about Medicare and Medicaid and our health care system. Their basic theory is that if we just turn Medicare into a voucher program and turn Medicaid into block grant programs, then now you, a Medicare recipient, will go out and you’ll shop for the best insurance that you’ve got -- that you can find -- and that you’re going to control costs because you’re going to say to the insurance company, this is all I can afford.

That will control costs, except if you get sick and the policy that you bought doesn’t cover what you’ve got. Then either you’re going to mortgage your house or you’re going to go to the emergency room, in which case I, who do have insurance, are going to have to pay for it indirectly because the hospital is going to have uncompensated care.

So they don’t really want to make the health care system more efficient and cheaper. What they want to do is to push the costs of health care inflation on to you. And then you’ll be on your own trying to figure out in the marketplace how to make health care cheaper. . . .