Mason Cooley, a professor of English at Columbia University, once said, “Procrastination makes easy things hard, and hard things harder.” Solving our nation’s deficit problem is hard, but Washington has made it even more difficult by procrastinating; waiting until the eleventh hour to discuss solutions to avoid the poorly constructed spending cuts – called the sequester – that went into effect March 1.
The sequester is a series of spending reductions that cut $85 billion in government spending this year, with another $1.1 trillion coming over the next decade. These cuts, which represent under two-and-a-half percent of our entire $3.5 trillion annual federal budget, were included in the Budget Control Act; legislation that I opposed and that the President signed into law in August 2011. That legislation capped discretionary spending and created a new Deficit Reduction Committee — commonly referred to as the SuperCommittee — to find an additional $1.2 trillion in budget savings. If the SuperCommittee failed, which it did, then the sequester would take effect.
Our country is $16.6 trillion in debt, so we need to cut spending. But the problem is that the sequester was structured in such a bad way by President Obama that it could provide an unnecessary pain to Americans across the country. My Republican colleagues and I have tried to work with Senate Democrats on common-sense spending cuts so we can get our crippling debt under control in a more responsible manner, but we’ve been met with virtual silence from President Obama and his Capitol Hill allies.
Senate Democrats offered a failed proposal that included tax hikes to replace these cuts, which I opposed – as did several Democrats. I even introduced alternative legislation to change the sequester cuts in a more responsible way.
My proposal included a series of spending reductions that actually cut more spending (more than $142.2 billion - almost $60 billion more than the sequester cuts), but in a much more common sense, reasonable way like freezing federal employees pay, reducing civilian agency’s travel budgets, and reducing government agency’s advertising budgets. It cuts spending by combining federal agencies and consolidating programs. It eliminates funding for public media, and cuts down on wasteful spending in the federal government for administrative costs. However, the Democrat-controlled Senate didn’t even allow a vote on what I proposed.
This is on top of five bipartisan reforms to our nation’s entitlement programs – Medicare and Medicaid – that I put forward earlier this year. If we are going to confront our debt, we have to look at these programs which are already larger in size than the economies of Italy, Germany, Spain and Great Britain combined. I asked my Democrat colleagues to join me to fix these programs so they aren’t just another broken promise not only to our seniors, but our children and grandchildren as well. Regrettably to date, not one has stepped forward to work with me to fix these programs that will also simultaneously help bring down our sky-high debt.
I’m not going to support legislation that requires the American people to give over more of their hard-earned money to Washington. We must cut spending if we want to get out of the red and pay off our nation’s debt.
Utahns deserve a responsible government, one capable of creating and balancing a budget and willing to face, rather than procrastinate, making of difficult decisions that will strengthen our nation for future generations.
No comments:
Post a Comment