House liberals release plan to replace cuts

House liberal Democrats on Tuesday offered their own plan to replace automatic spending cuts slated to begin on March 1.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus is calling for nearly $1 trillion in tax increases and nearly $300 billion in targeted defense cuts over ten years to replace nine years of across-the-board cuts.

The plan comes on a day when President Obama called on Congress to replace the first few months of spending cuts, but did not specify a list of replacement taxes and spending cuts.

The Progressive Caucus bill gets $960 billion in revenue from ending corporate and individual tax breaks many of which have been floated by the White House or Democratic budget proposals in the past. 

It would get nearly half the revenue by imposing a 28 percent cap on the value of deductions and exclusions individuals can use in a year, a proposal Obama put in his last budget. It gets some $161 billion by changing the way corporations claim international tax status. Another $94 billion comes from ending tax breaks for oil and gas companies.

For the Pentagon, the bill would pare back the nuclear arsenal, cut back purchases of F-35 fighter jets, and reduce troop levels by 4 percent, among other things.

Progressives argue that adding their proposal to the spending cuts and tax increases from fiscal deals in Congress since 2011 achieves a one-to-one balance of taxes to spending cuts. 

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