The administration has been pushing back on the Ryan plan since it was released two weeks ago. Obama: Ryan plan is 'Trojan horse'

President Barack Obama on Tuesday will shred the House GOP budget as a “Trojan horse” built around radical right-wing, “thinly veiled social Darwinism” and the makings of a renewed recession.

That’s the message he’ll take to The Associated Press’s annual luncheon in Washington, according to prepared remarks provided by the White House: The plan written by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan is directly opposed to the message of economic fairness he’s been pushing since late last year.


“It’s antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everyone who’s willing to work for it — a place where prosperity doesn’t trickle down from the top, but grows outward from the heart of the middle class,” Obama will say of Ryan’s budget, drawing on the same themes he touched on in his December speech in Osawatomie, Kan., and his State of the Union address in January. “[B]y gutting the very things we need to grow an economy that’s built to last — education and training; research and development — it’s a prescription for decline.”

The administration has been pushing back on the Ryan plan since it was released two weeks ago but is stepping up the attacks following the House’s approval of the plan last Friday. And it won’t be lost in the president’s remarks that Mitt Romney, who’s hoping to start wrapping up the GOP nomination, has backed the Ryan plan — and has been endorsed by Ryan himself ahead of Tuesday’s Wisconsin primary.

In November’s presidential election, Obama will suggest, Americans will have the choice between someone who supports that prescription and someone who believes in the “success of a strong and growing middle class.”

“Whoever he may be, the next president will inherit an economy that is recovering, but not yet recovered, from the worst economic calamity since the Great Depression,” Obama will say. “Too many Americans will still be looking for a job that pays enough to cover their bills or their mortgage. Too many of our citizens will still lack the sort of financial security that started slipping away years before the recession hit. And a debt that has grown over the last decade, primarily as a result of two wars, two massive tax cuts, and an unprecedented financial crisis, will have to be paid down.”

“In this country, broad-based prosperity has never trickled-down from the success of a wealthy few,” as Republicans suggest, Obama will say. “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 GI Bill, including my grandfather, helped build the most prosperous economy the world has ever known. That’s why a CEO like Henry Ford made it his mission to pay his workers enough so they could buy the cars that they made. That’s why studies have shown that countries with less inequality tend to have stronger and steadier economic growth over the long run.”

Conor Sweeney, Ryan’s communications director, said in a statement to POLITICO that Obama “has refused to honestly confront the most predictable economic crisis in our history. Instead, he has accelerated the nation toward this looming debt-fueled crisis with reckless budgets, always accompanied by partisan speeches that seek to divide the nation in order to distract from his legacy of broken promises. If he thinks there is no political price to pay for this total abdication of leadership, he is due for a rude awakening."

“If nothing else, President Obama and Chairman Ryan, with their two approaches to budgeting, have helped clarify the choice for the American people: the president’s path to debt and decline versus the restoration of the promise and prosperity of our exceptional nation,” Sweeney said.