Under recently passed legislation, Congress has until March 1 to agree on deficit reduction, and if it doesn’t, the Defense Department will be forced to cut $55 billion every year through 2021, and the same amount ($55 billion) automatically would be cut in non-defense spending.
“Don’t forget one other thing,” Ryan said. “We passed legislation — I wrote it and passed it in the House twice to replace those sequesters with cuts in other areas of government. So we’ve shown precisely how we should protect defense spending by cutting spending in other areas. And, by the way, in our budget last year, we did take money out of Defense, just not nearly as much as the president seems to want to.
“We think these sequesters will happen because the Democrats have opposed our efforts to replace those with others, and they’ve offered no alternatives.”
Democrats and President Obama insist that any deficit reduction must include higher taxes.
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