By Alysha Bohanon
President Obama gave a speech blasting the Republican budget plan Tuesday, calling it a "Trogan horse" that would greatly deepen inequality in the United States, news sources report.
In the speech to editors and reporters of the Associated Press, Obama warned that the budget plan produced by the House would create severe cuts to college scholarships, medical research, national parks, and even technology to make accurate weather forecasts, the New York Times reported.
He also compared the plan to Newt Gingrich's legislative manifesto of 1994, saying the budget was "so far to the right, it makes the Contract With America look like the New Deal," the Washington Post reported.
Obama also made broader claims about the GOP as a whole, arguing that the entire party has shifted and become much more radical. One of the party's more moderate icons, Ronald Reagan, would be unelectable in the modern Republican Party, Obama said, according to the Washington Post.
Echoing the themes of his State of the Union address, the president argued that the GOP's "radical" plan that slashes spending to social program and gives tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans will not strengthen the economy.
"In this country, broad-based prosperity has never trickled down from the success of a wealthy few," the president said, according to the New York Times. "It has always come from the success of a strong and growing middle class. That's how a generation who went to college on the G.I. Bill, including my grandfather, helped build the most prosperous economy the world has ever known."
The 2013 budget was drafted by Representative Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.). Obama claims the proposal calls for across-the-board cuts in discretionary spending, and includes tax cuts which would disproportionately benefit the wealthiest Americans and would cost $4.6 trillion over the next decade, according to the New York Times.
"Disguised as deficit reduction plans, it is really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country. It is thinly veiled social Darwinism," The New York Times quoted Obama as saying. "And by gutting the very things we need to grow an economy that's built to last -- education and training, research and development, our infrastructure -- it's a prescription for decline."
The speech drew immediate push back from the right, including the budget's author. "Like his reckless budgets, today's speech by President Obama is as revealing as it is disappointing: While others lead by offering real solutions, he has chosen to distort the truth and divide Americans in order to distract from his failed record," Ryan said in a statement, the Washington Post reported.
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