Rep. Paul Ryan's Budget Plan

The Republican budget addresses specific "core areas," including national defense, the free enterprise system, the social safety net, health and retirement programs, the tax code, and government spending (including the budget process).
Highlights of each area include:
• National Defense: Eliminates $55 billion in "indiscriminate" cuts to the defense budget currently slated to hit in January, 2013 while implementing targeted spending reductions, because "the nation has no higher priority than safeguarding the safety and liberty of its citizens from threats at home and abroad."
• Free Enterprise: Ends corporate welfare, "stop[ping] Washington from picking winners and losers," rolling back energy company subsidies, ending bailouts of financial institutions, and repealing Obamacare. Also implements a range of policies to increase domestic energy production, lower fuel costs, and create energy-related jobs while reducing dependence on foreign oil.
• Social Safety Net: Block grants Medicaid to the states, changing the welfare system so that it "does not entrap able-bodied citizens into lives of complacency and dependency." Simplifies federal education and job-training programs to create accountability and minimize government-caused tuition inflation.
• Health and Retirement Programs: Adds a range of Medicare coverage options, including "traditional Medicare fee-for service," creates competition between health plans, offers tort reform, and implements a premium-support model to keep the system from bankrupting the nation. Provides "increased assistance for lower-income beneficiaries and those with greater health risks" while not reducing benefits for anyone in or near retirement. Like the prior House budget, this plan makes no specific recommendations regarding Social Security, but "calls on the President and both chambers of Congress to ensure the solvency of this critical program."
• Tax Code: Reforms the individual income tax code so there are just two tax brackets, 10 percent and 25 percent, "while clearing out the burdensome tangle of loopholes that distort economic activity." Cuts the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent while "shifting to a territorial system" so that U.S. corporate tax only applies to profits earned in the U.S. Repeals the Alternative Minimum Tax. Broadens the tax base and reduces federal spending to below 20 percent of GDP. Simplifies the tax code in order to reduce the cost of compliance, currently estimated at "over $160 billion per year, or 14 percent of all income tax receipts collected."
• Government spending and budgeting: Implements enforceable spending caps, gives Congress more oversight over "wasteful Washington spending," and increases spending transparency.