The chairman of the House Budget Committee, Paul Ryan, has a short post up defending Speaker Boehner's budget bill, saying that while it is "far from perfect," it "takes an important step in the right direction by cutting $1.2 trillion in government spending over the next decade. Critically, it does this without resorting to Senator Reid's gimmicks and without imposing the president's preferred tax increases on American families and the struggling economy." The Congressional Budget Office, meanwhile, "estimates that the legislation would reduce budget deficits by about $850 billion between 2012 and 2021 relative to CBO's March 2011 baseline adjusted for subsequent appropriation action. As requested, CBO has also calculated the net budgetary impact if discretionary savings are measured relative to its January baseline projections. Relative to that baseline, CBO estimates that the legislation would reduce budget deficits by about $1.1 trillion between 2012 and 2021."
Meanwhile, Mike Allen's Politico Playbook quotes ABC's Jake Tapper, among the White House correspondents who has been toughest on Obama: "You could argue that … House Republicans have already won the argument. Because taxes are off the table in the short term. And we are debating, 'How much should the government cut in spending,' not whether or not the government should be cutting at all."