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| Ryan Unveils House GOP Budget Claiming Balance - ABC News Posted: 01 Apr 2014 08:52 AM PDT House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan unveiled an updated Republican budget plan Tuesday that would slash $5.1 trillion in federal spending over coming decade and promises to balance the government's books with wide-ranging cuts in programs like food stamps and government-paid health care for the poor and working class. Ryan's plan would also cut Pell Grants for low-income students and pensions for federal workers, while steering away from cuts to benefits for senior citizens, at least in the short term. The proposal would reprise a voucher-like Medicare program for future retirees that would be the basis for GOP claims that the measure would drive down government debt over the long term. It also relies on unofficial scorekeeping help from the Congressional Budget Office, reflecting the beneficial effects of deficit cuts on long-term economic growth and tax revenues. The plan should skate through the Budget Committee on Wednesday but faces challenges on the floor next week since it endorses a bipartisan pact — negotiated by Ryan and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Patty Murray, D-Wash., in December — to increase agency operating budgets this year and next. Many conservatives who opposed the pact last year would have to reverse course and embrace them as part of the GOP budget. Democrats who helped pass the Ryan-Murray pact in December will oppose the GOP plan. The legislation promises to serve more as a political and policy statement by House Republicans than a realistic attempt to engage President Barack Obama and Democrats, who control the Senate, in any serious effort to further cut the deficit. Election-year politics are in play, for starters, as are entrenched differences over spending and taxes. At issue is the arcane congressional budget process, which employs a non-binding measure known as a budget resolution to set forth goals for future taxes, spending, and deficits. But follow-up legislation is usually limited to one-year appropriations bills rather than more difficult measure to deal with the government's long-term fiscal challenges, which are fueled by spiraling health care costs and the retirement of the baby boom generation. Ryan's budget brings back a now-familiar list of spending cuts to promise balance, including $2.1 trillion over 10 years in health care subsidies and coverage under the Affordable Care Act, $732 billion in cuts to Medicaid and other health care programs, and almost $1 trillion in cuts to other benefit programs like food stamps, Pell Grants, and farm subsidies. While repealing the benefits of "Obamacare," Ryan would preserve its tax increases and cuts to providers, including cuts to private insurers under the Medicare Advantage program. Republicans have attacked Democrats for the Medicare cuts used to finance the new health care law. "By cutting wasteful spending, strengthening key priorities, and laying the foundation for a stronger economy, we have shown the American people there's a better way forward," Ryan said in a statement. As in the past, Ryan has steered clear of cuts to Social Security and promises steady increases for veterans. But he faced a more challenging task to promise to balance the budget by decade's end than he did last year because the CBO projects lagging revenue estimates. |
| Malaysian credibility in jet hunt questioned again after latest blunder - CBS News Posted: 01 Apr 2014 09:18 AM PDT Last Updated Apr 1, 2014 11:30 AM EDT KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia -- It may mean little to investigators that the last words air traffic controllers heard from the lost jetliner were "Good night, Malaysian three-seven-zero," rather than "All right, good night." But to Malaysian officials whose credibility has been questioned almost from the beginning, it means a great deal. Malaysian officials said more than two weeks ago that "All right, good night," were the last words, and that the co-pilot uttered them. They changed the account late Monday and said they are still investigating who it was that spoke. The discrepancy added to the confusion and frustration families of the missing already felt more than three weeks after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared, and as of Tuesday officials had not explained how they got it wrong. "This sort of mistake hits at the heart of trust in their communications. If Malaysia is changing what the pilot said, people start thinking, 'What are they going to change next?" said Hamish McLean, an expert in risk and crisis communication at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. "Information in a crisis is absolutely critical. When we are dealing with such a small amount of information its needs to be handled very carefully," he said. Authorities have been forced on the defensive by the criticism, the most forceful of which has come from a group of Chinese relatives who accuse them of lying about - or even involvement in - the plane's disappearance. In part responding to domestic political criticism, defense minister Hishammuddin Hussein has taken to retweeting supportive comments on Twitter. He has twice in recent days proclaimed that "history would judge us well" over the handling of the crisis.The government's opponents disagree. Opposition leader Lim Kit Siang said the correction set off a "medley of shame, sadness and anger" and strengthened the case for creating an opposition-led parliamentary committee to investigate the government's performance in the search. The communications skills of any government or airline would have been severely tested by the search for the Boeing 777-200 and its 239 passengers and crew. So far not a scrap of debris has been found. "There has been very little to tell and a lot of unanswered questions," said Andrew Herdman, director-general of the Association of Asia Pacific Airlines. "There is frustration on the lack of new information, frustration over progress with investigations and the search. That frustration is being channeled to the Malaysian authorities but I think it's a bit premature to use that to reflect adversely on how they are doing." Still, the government's handling of information has at times fed perceptions that it was holding back. From the first day of the search, crews were looking far to the west of the plane's last point of contact with air-traffic controllers, but it took about a week for officials to explain that radar had detected the plane in the area. "There are some things that I can tell you and some things that I can't," Malaysia's civil aviation chief said cryptically in the early days of the search."That was a terrible, terrible response," said Lyall Mercer, the principal of Australian-based Mercer PR, a public relations company. "It says to the families that 'we know things that we are not going to share' and that 'something else is more important than you'." The piece of information that families most want to hear - whether their relatives are alive or dead - has remained impossible to say with finality, creating a dilemma for the government. On March 24, it tried to address that. Malaysia Airlines officials met families in Kuala Lumpur and Beijing and sent a text message to others saying "we have to assume beyond any reasonable doubt that MH370 has been lost and that none of those on board survived." At a news conference half an hour later, Prime Minister Najib Razak was less direct. He said with "deep sadness and regret" that the plane's last known position was "a remote location, far from any possible landing sites," and that the flight "ended" in the southern Indian Ocean. Sarah Bacj, a 48-year-old American expatriate teacher whose boyfriend, Philip Wood, was on the flight, said the decision by Malaysia Airlines to inject some certainty into the fate of the passengers was a mistake. Until then, she said she thought the Malaysian government had acted responsibly, but the text message "totally violated my trust.""I fell off the cliff," Bacj said. "The way the text message came, I expected proof. That they had found the bodies, or that they had found confirmed wreckage, or something ... but they didn't actually tell us anything at all. The only thing they did was make a judgment statement about evidence - unconfirmed evidence, mind you." The final words from the cockpit, and who said them, are of interest not only because there are few other clues to the disappearance, but because the communication occurred just a minute before the plane's transponders were shut off. The words were in English, as aviation communications are around the world. PR experts and professionals said the important thing now is to try and give the families as much information as possible, before the media gets hold of it, and to keep paying attention to them even when the media gaze had drifted. On Tuesday, the Malaysian government announced that technical experts from Malaysia, China and Australia would brief the families in a closed-door session in Kuala Lumpur. Meanwhile, the three-week hunt for Flight 370 has turned up no sign of the Boeing 777. The race to find debris from the plane before the black box stops sending out a "ping" signal ramped up this week, and the pressure is on.  If the black box pinger goes silent -- which should happen when the batteries die in one or two weeks -- Matthews said it will become "much more difficult to find, and much more time consuming to do those searches." Australia said Tuesday that it would deploy a modified Boeing 737 to act as a flying air traffic control center over the Indian Ocean, to prevent a mid-air collision among the aircraft searching for the missing jetliner. An air force E-7A Wedgetail equipped with advanced radar was to be deployed "in the near future" to monitor the increasingly crowded skies over the remote search zone, said Angus Houston, who heads the joint agency coordinating the multinational search effort. At a news conference in Perth, Houston, the former Australian defense chief, called the search effort the most challenging one he has ever seen. The starting point for any search is the last known position of the vehicle or aircraft, he said. "In this particular case, the last known position was a long, long way from where the aircraft appears to have gone," he said. "It's very complex, it's very demanding." "What we really need now is to find debris, wreckage from the aircraft," he said. "This could drag on for a long time." The search zone area has shifted as experts analyzed Flight 370's limited radar and satellite data, moving from the seas off Vietnam to the waters west of Malaysia and Indonesia, and then to several areas west of Australia. The current search zone is a remote 98,000 square mile that is a roughly 2 1/2 hour flight from Perth. © 2014 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report. |
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