Obama to GOP: Offer budget alternatives

WASHINGTON -- Gearing up for negotiations with Congress over his proposed budget, President Obama chided Republican lawmakers Monday for opposing his initiatives without offering alternatives.

"I do think that the Republican Party right now hasn't sort of figured out what it's for," Obama said in a White House interview with The Courier-Journal and reporters from five other newspapers. "And so as a proxy, they've just decided 'we're going to be against whatever the other side is for.' That's not what's needed in an economic crisis."

He added that "you could play that game maybe in the early '90s, when basically we were pretty prosperous. Right now, everybody's got to pull together."

Congressional Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., have unleashed a flurry of attacks on the president's proposed $3.6 trillion budget plan.

McConnell has said Obama's budget "spends too much, taxes too much and borrows too much." Other Republicans have said the potential impact of the president's plan on the nation's debt is unsustainable.

Obama said Monday that the government had to take what he called "short-term emergency steps" to address the ailing economy.

"We are going through an extraordinary economic crisis, the worst since the Great Depression," he said, sitting at the meeting table in the White House's Roosevelt Room.

The answer to long-term growth is the kind of investment in health care, education and energy that is contained in his budget plan, the president said.

"What we still haven't seen from those who would argue that we're trying to do too much is an alternative budget," Obama said. "And the reason we haven't seen an alternative budget is because they know full well that the real drivers of our deficits long-term have almost everything to do with our rising health care costs. Our problem is Medicare and Medicaid, and we can't fix that unless we fix health care as a whole."