Senate Democrats Offer a Proposal to Head Off Automatic Cuts

The Democratic proposal would establish a 30-percent minimum tax rate on incomes over $1 million to raise about $54 billion over 10 years. It would raise $1 billion more by subjecting tar sands oil to a tax to pay for oil-spill cleanups and by ending a business tax deduction for the cost of moving equipment overseas.

The remaining $55 billion would come from $27.5 billion in defense cuts from 2015 to 2021 and $27.5 billion in farm-subsidy cuts.

The legislation is more a bargaining position than a solution. Republicans have said they will not accept any new taxes in a deal to head off the so-called sequester — across-the-board cuts to defense and domestic programs of 5 percent to 8 percent and totaling about $1 trillion over 10 years. But Senate Democratic leaders said Thursday that their party must rally support around an alternative to try to move negotiations forward.

“This bill is an important chess piece,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Democrat in the Senate.

Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio on Thursday repeated his demand that the Senate take the first steps to replace the spending cuts before the House considers its move, but no one predicted that the Senate Democrats’ proposal would rally the bipartisan support needed to overcome a near-certain Republican filibuster and reach the House.

“I would hope that we can get to 51 votes, and that majority would rule,” said Senator Barbara Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland, the chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “I’m confident we will have the majority — if not the totality — of the Democratic caucus.”

Senate Democrats emerged from a protracted lunch meeting over the plan voicing only grudging support. Senator Max Baucus of Montana, the chairman of the tax-writing Finance Committee, said he worried that wringing savings from farm subsidies now instead of in a broad farm bill would make it harder to pass an overhaul of agricultural programs that has been stalled for nearly a year.

Senators Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, and Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, denounced the 50-50 mix of cuts and taxes, after Democrats have swallowed far more spending cuts than tax increases over two years of deficit-reduction efforts.

Republicans dismissed the proposal as a worthless gimmick.

“This is not a solution — even they know it can’t pass; that’s the idea,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader. “It’s a political stunt.”

The White House praised the package. Jay Carney, the press secretary, called it a “balanced plan to avoid across-the-board budget cuts that will hurt kids, seniors, and our men and women in uniform.”

“Republicans in Congress face a simple choice,” he added. “Do they protect investments in education, health care and national defense, or do they continue to prioritize and protect tax loopholes that benefit the very few at the expense of middle- and working-class Americans?”

As the cuts approach, warnings of disaster are growing increasingly dire. The Senate Appropriations Committee released a barrage of letters from agencies spelling out how the cuts would be meted out: 600,000 low-income women and children dropped from federal nutrition programs; meat and poultry plants forced to close because of furloughed federal inspectors; deep cuts to the poor school systems that rely most heavily on federal assistance; delayed permits for oil and gas production; and shorter seasons, reduced operating hours and possible park closings in the national park system. Job losses could reach 750,000 this year, said Representative Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland.

While Republicans and Democrats agree the cuts would be destructive, neither side seems ready to negotiate a solution. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, reached out to Mr. Boehner on Thursday. Mr. Boehner said he told Mr. Reid what he has been saying publicly: The House will look at what the Senate can produce.

“This sequester was the president’s idea,” Mr. Boehner said. “His party needs to follow through on their plans to replace it.”

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Ryan Defends His 'Yes' Vote on Automatic Defense Cuts

WASHINGTON – Representative Paul D. Ryan, the Republican nominee for vice president, on Sunday defended his decision to support automatic cuts in defense spending as a way to force a deal on reducing the deficit, an approach that was sharply criticized by his running mate, Mitt Romney.

Mr. Ryan said that he backed the deal, which could result in an automatic 8 percent cut in defense spending in January, in an effort to compromise with Democrats on deficit reduction.

“I worked with President Obama to find common ground to get a down payment on deficit reduction,” Mr. Ryan said on the CBS News program “Face the Nation.” “It wasn’t a big down payment, but it was a step in the right direction.”

Mr. Ryan emphasized that he and his fellow House Republicans had come up with alternative spending cuts to prevent the automatic reductions from taking effect. He accused Mr. Obama and Senate Democrats of failing to do their part.

“We passed, in the House, a bill to prevent those devastating defense cuts by cutting spending elsewhere,” Mr. Ryan said. “The Senate’s done nothing. President Obama’s done nothing.”

“We wanted to have a bipartisan agreement; we got that,” he added. “And the president hasn’t fulfilled his end of that bipartisan agreement.”

The House bill, which Mr. Ryan wrote and Senate Democrats oppose, would stave off reductions in military spending by cutting safety-net programs for the poor, including food stamps, school lunch subsidies and children’s health insurance.

Mr. Obama said in an interview broadcast on Sunday that any budget deal should require the wealthiest Americans to do their part by paying higher taxes, an approach that has been rejected by Mr. Ryan and Mr. Romney.

In a “Face the Nation” interview, Mr. Obama said that he was “willing to do more” to work with Republicans to find additional spending cuts. ”But we’ve also got to ask people like me or Governor Romney who have done better than anybody else over the course of the last decade, and whose taxes are just about lower than they’ve been in the last 50 years, to do a little bit more.”

At the Democratic National Convention, former President Bill Clinton accused Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan of planning to eliminate tax deductions that help the middle class and the poor, including for home mortgages and charitable donations, to cover the costs of their proposed tax cuts.

In a separate appearance on the ABC News program “This Week,” Mr. Ryan declined to say whether that was true.

“Our priorities are high-income earners should not get these kinds of loopholes,” said Mr. Ryan, who repeatedly refused to specify the particular loopholes he had in mind.

“We want to have this debate with Congress,” he said. “And we want to do this with the consent of the elected representatives of the people and figure out what loopholes should stay or go and who should or should not get them.”

On foreign policy, Mr. Ryan told the host of “This Week,” George Stephanopolous, that he and Mr. Romney agreed with Mr. Obama’s plan to leave Afghanistan by 2014. But he said he feared that the troops lacked adequate resources.

“Where we’ve taken issue is making sure that the generals on the ground get the resources they need throughout the entire fighting season so that they can keep our soldiers safe and operating counterinsurgency strategy,” said Mr. Ryan, who described the killing of Osama bin Laden ”a great success.”

Mr. Ryan also defended Mr. Romney, who has been criticized by Democrats for describing Russia as the country’s “No. 1 geopolitical foe.”

On “Face the Nation,” Mr. Ryan said that a nuclear Iran was the United States’ biggest foreign policy threat, and that Mr. Romney meant to say that “among the other powers, China and Russia, that Russia stands as a great threat.”

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