Sen. Kent Conrad
Echoing Sen. Dick Durbin, who casts the Obama budget proposal as
the left side of the spectrum from the Republican plan, renowned deficit peacock Sen. Kent Conrad says the budget he'll come up with will
find a middle ground.
Conrad, considered a fiscal conservative among Democrats, suggests he will stake out the middle ground in between the visions of House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and President Barack Obama. Conrad hopes his budget, which he might unveil in May, will ultimately emerge as the most viable bipartisan vehicle to start whittling down the national debt. But it will take deft political maneuvering to get that plan through the narrowly divided Senate – and would be a momentous task to reconcile his version with the Ryan plan that not a single House Democrat supported.
For the record, again, the Obama plan should not be considered the left pole in the budget debate. It's a very conservative plan. It's been correctly called "center right" by Paul Krugman, and "a rather conservative one, significantly to the right of the Rivlin-Domenici plan" by the Center on Budget and Policy Priority's Bob Greenstein.
The left pole in this debate truly is the the People's Budget, introduced by the Congressional Progressive Caucus which has been praised by the likes of The Economist and Paul Krugman alike. It has some very smart solutions that could quite easily be incorporated into a larger plan, and should be.