Alex Wagner, Douglas Holtz-Eakin Clash Over Budget (VIDEO)

Alex Wagner and guest Douglas Holtz-Eakin had a testy conversation about the budget on Wagner's show on Tuesday.

Holtz-Eakin, the former director of the Congressional Budget Office and economist on President George H.W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, defended the Paul Ryan budget while criticizing the Murray budget supported by the Democrats. He clashed with Wagner several times during the panel's discussion.

He said he disagreed with Wagner's assertion that the Democrats' proposal provided both spending cuts and revenue. "My disagreement with folks like you, who are desperately wrong on the issue, is that — did I say that right?" he asked.

"No, you didn't," Wagner said. "You meant to say deeply correct."

Later, speaking over Wagner, Holtz-Eakin alleged that President Obama has not led on a legislative front. "I think it is ridiculous to put all of this on the shoulders of the president who has gone out —" Wagner argued.

"He ran for the job for God's sake, do it!" he exclaimed.

The two also disagreed over his suggestion that Republicans have continued to offer ways to raise revenue while President Obama has refused to compromise. He continued to speak even as she Wagner countered his point that Republicans offered less revenue than they did last year.

"Let's just keep doing arithmetic, it helps," Holtz-Eakin interrupted.

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Paul Ryan Budget Reduces Spending To Lowest Levels Since 1948: Report

Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-Wis.) proposed budget would reduce government spending outside of Social Security and interest on debt to its lowest levels in over six decades, Investor's Business Daily reported Wednesday.

Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman, unveiled his latest fiscal proposal on Tuesday, laying out $4.6 trillion in cuts over the next decade. The blueprint aims to balance the budget in 10 years by slashing Medicare, Medicaid and programs to aid the poor, including food stamps. Ryan's plan would also repeal President Barack Obama's health care reform law.

"This is not only a responsible, reasonable balanced plan," Ryan said on Tuesday. "It's also an invitation. This is an invitation to the president of the United States, to the Senate Democrats, to come together to fix these problems."

Under the House GOP plan, government spending would hit its lowest levels in 65 years. Investor's Business Daily's Jed Graham reports:

By 2023, under Paul Ryan's budget, the entirety of federal spending outside of Social Security and interest on the debt (16.4% of GDP in 2012) would shrink to 11.2% of GDP, a level not seen since 1948 — before ObamaCare, Medicare, Medicaid, NASA, the interstate highway system and almost before the first baby boomers were born.

That is nearly 25% below the 14.6% of GDP average over the past 64 years. In the only three years over this span that saw spending on the main functions of government (outside of saving for retirement) dip just below 12% of GDP, the unemployment rate averaged 4.5% or less, shrinking safety net outlays while bolstering the spending capacity of state and local governments.

Graham also calculates that by leaving Medicare expenditures out as well as Social Security and interest, spending levels would shrink to 7.9 percent of GDP by 2023, the lowest level since 1938, before Social Security and Medicare programs were created.

Click here to read more on Ryan's budget plan.

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Budget Cuts Threaten Weather Forecasts, NOAA's Jane Lubchenco Warns

The VIIRS sensor on the NOAA/NASA Suomi NPP satellite passed over the central eye of Hurricane Sandy on Oct. 25, 2012. Without the satellite data, NOAA’s weather forecasts would become less reliable.

By Climate Central's Lauren Morello:

BOSTON — Automatic budget cuts set to take effect March 1 could add to the woes of the federal government’s troubled weather satellite programs, jeopardizing future forecasts, a top official said Friday.

“It’s not going to be pretty,” outgoing National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco said of the package of across-the-board spending cuts known as “sequestration.”

“The sequester has the potential to wreak havoc with so many different things, and satellites loom large within that,” she told reporters at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “There’s just so much uncertainty. Nobody knows how long it might last, and it’s very difficult to plan for that.”

The VIIRS sensor on the NOAA/NASA Suomi NPP satellite passed over the central eye of Hurricane Sandy on Oct. 25, 2012. Without the satellite data, NOAA’s weather forecasts would become less reliable.
Credit: JPSS/NOAA/NASA
The sequestration cuts, which will take effect unless Congress can overcome political gridlock and approve a new spending deal, would chop 8.2 percent from the operating budgets of most federal agencies, including NOAA, the White House Office of Management and Budget estimates.

“The way it is structured, [sequestration] applies to every single line item” in NOAA’s budget, said Lubchenco, who will leave her post at NOAA next month. “We don’t have a lot of discretion to say this is more important than that. Everything gets whacked.”

And that could further delay the launch of the nation’s next polar-orbiting environmental satellite, adding to the likelihood of a gap between probes collecting data that powers the nation’s weather forecasts.

NOAA has warned for several years of a near-certain gap in data collected by the nation’s current polar-orbiting satellite, Suomi NPP, and its replacement, JPSS-1.

That’s because Suomi, which launched in late 2011, was designed to operate for at least five years. But JPSS-1, won’t reach orbit until early 2017 — or later.

And that is setting up a potential gap in key weather data that could last anywhere from 17 to 53 months, the Government Accountability Office warned this week in its annual analysis of federal programs at “high risk” for waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement, or those “needing broad-based transformation.”

It sounds wonky. But without that polar-orbiting satellite data, NOAA’s weather forecasts would become less reliable. The agency has calculated that it would have underestimated the amount of snow that fell during the “Snowmageddon” blizzard that hit the East Coast in 2010 by 10 inches. And its forecasts would have placed the center of the storm 200 to 300 miles away from its actual epicenter.

And forecasters at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, who use data from U.S. polar-orbiting satellites, said that without that information, their weather model would not have accurately projected the path of Hurricane Sandy.

With that in mind, Lubchenco said she’s concerned that the looming budget cuts could add to the gap in satellite data that NOAA is already struggling with. Budget shortfalls in 2011 helped create that gap, she said.

NOAA is “doing everything possible to not have further delays, which means in large part having really good management and adequate funding,” Lubchenco said. “And the adequate funding is a very big challenge in today’s fiscal climate.”

As her four years at NOAA draw to a close, Lubchenco said the Obama administration has worked aggressively to combat climate change, but could do more.

President Obama “has always taken climate change seriously, which is why he set in motion a number of things that have been very, very important,” Lubchenco said. “Many of the actions that (the Environmental Protection Agency) has undertaken are very, very important steps in the right direction.

“Do they go far enough? No. Will we see more? I sure hope so.”

Lubchenco also told reporters that “bizarre,” “crazy” weather has come to define her term at NOAA’s helm.

“In the last four years, we’ve had 650 major tornadoes, 51 Atlantic hurricanes, six major floods, three tsunamis, persistent drought, numerous heatwaves and recordbreaking snowfall and blizzards,” she said, ticking off what she described as an “extraordinary” laundry list of natural disasters.

In the end, Lubchenco said, she has few regrets about her government tenure.

“I’m immensely proud of all the things we have done over the last four years,” she said.

Related Content
Sans Polar Satellites, Hurricane Sandy Forecasts Would Have Suffered
Weather, Climate Forecasts Imperiled as Programs Cut
NOAA Seeks Public Input on Looming Satellite Gap

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CRFB Corporate Ties: Budget Watchdog Funded By Big Tobacco In 1990s Health Care Fight

Packs of cigarettes wait to be purchased at a Chicago-area news stand on Nov. 30, 2012. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

WASHINGTON -- The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget is known in Washington as a nonpartisan budget watchdog, a central voice in calls to rein in the nation's debt. The CRFB features a respected list of Republicans and Democrats on its board and regularly hosts current leaders in the nation's capital for panel discussions on the future of the budget.

But historical documents raise questions about whether the CRFB -- which is also the primary vehicle advocating private equity billionaire Peter Peterson's debt reduction agenda, including cuts to social safety net programs --- has allowed corporate donations to influence its work on budget issues.

The organization was used in the early 1990s to create a front group for tobacco companies during the battle over President Bill Clinton's health care reform proposal. That group, called the Cost Containment Coalition, presented itself as a civic-minded coalition of those interested in finding the most responsible solution to the health care crisis. The corporate interests funding it had entirely different motives, according to documents collected by the Public Accountability Initiative, a public interest research nonprofit.

According to these documents, found in the Tobacco Legacy Library and at the Securities and Exchange Commission, the CRFB from 1992 to 1994 accepted money from the tobacco industry -- including Philip Morris and the Tobacco Institute -- in exchange for using the group's image as a bipartisan budget watchdog, through the coalition, to advocate against a proposed excise tax on tobacco products.

In a 1992 memo, Philip Morris spokesman Craig Fuller wrote that health care coalitions at the time were focused on how to solve the problem of access to health care, while "[v]ery little attention has been paid to the true problem with the health care system that actually impairs access and also puts Philip Morris at risk vis-a-vis increased excise taxes -- the escalating costs of the system and how to pay for it."

The solution to explaining this "true problem" was found in the formation of the Cost Containment Coalition. This group, according to the same 1992 Philip Morris memo, was to be formed "under the auspices of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, and will be directed by Carol Cox," then president of the CRFB.

At the time, the CRFB president, whose full last name is Cox-Wait, was listed in an internal Philip Morris document as one of many "corporate affairs consultants" receiving personal compensation from the company. These documents show that she received $47,000 from the tobacco company in 1993, in the middle of the CRFB's work for the tobacco industry. Cox-Wait was also married to Philip Morris Vice President Bob Wait.

In an interview, Cox-Wait denied any impropriety, saying that the information in the tobacco documents may reveal Philip Morris' perspective on its interaction with the CRFB, but it was not that of the committee.

"They contributed to us, and they may have seen it that way, but what we were doing was a very serious study," Cox-Wait said, referring to a report on health care reform costs released by the CRFB.

In 1993, Calvin H. George, tax counsel at the Tobacco Institute, the industry's lobbying arm, described that report as "useful" to protecting tobacco profits.

"What is most useful here is a strong statement from a bipartisan group of budget experts warning that rhetoric about reforming health care as a means of bringing the deficit under control should be viewed with skepticism, at best," George wrote in an internal message to Susan Stuntz, vice president of public affairs at the Tobacco Institute.

Cox-Wait further defended her dual work at the time as both a corporate consultant and the head of the respected budget group. "When I was president of CRFB, I also ran a small consulting firm called Carol Cox & Associates. My board was aware of it. When I did that, I took a cut in pay and separated the time I did for the two of them."

Corporate interests pushing unpopular policies often seek cover from respected independent groups. In the tobacco industry's eyes, the CRFB apparently filled that role. "Because of her bipartisan Board, 'Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget,' and given her 'neutral' status, Carol is able to access many people who would be inaccessible to us given our issues," another internal Philip Morris document explained.

Cox-Wait said she always made it known that her consulting work was separate from her work at the CRFB. "I would say this is two hats, and this has nothing to do with the committee when I was giving budget process advice to private parties and being paid for it," she said.

The CRFB's connection to the tobacco industry did not end after the Clinton health care proposal fizzled in 1994. Internal documents from both Philip Morris and the Tobacco Institute show that Cox-Wait continued her consulting for the industry up until 2001. In a Feb. 7, 2001, letter dictating a schedule for a Philip Morris tax-and-budget team meeting, Cox-Wait is listed as the presenter for the "Federal Budget Situation."

Tobacco companies were not the only ones who saw the CRFB as worth connecting with. During the 1990s, insurance companies made contributions to the group and, according to a 1994 SEC filing by the health insurer Cigna, Cox-Wait was paid $12,000 as a consultant before joining the company's board in 1995. While Cox-Wait was under contract with Cigna, which opposed health care reform, the CRFB released a 148-page report that pointedly criticized seemingly every significant health care reform proposal at the time.

Cox-Wait remains on the board of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which is now run by Maya MacGuineas. Last year, the CRFB created a new entity called Fix the Debt, also headed by MacGuineas and funded by Peterson and multiple CEOs and corporations. Fix the Debt is calling for a grand deficit bargain to be reached by raising revenue, cutting spending and reforming social insurance programs.

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