The federal budget should reflect our country’s priorities and values. Our budget for the next fiscal year [FY2007] needs to meet the challenges posed by the most important issues facing the United States at this point in our history, including: the war on terrorism; the need to secure the homeland; the aging of our population and the rising costs, including health care costs, associated with that demographic change; the need to ensure that our country has the best education system in the world; and the continuance of the economic growth our country has enjoyed over the past few years, among many others.

Unfortunately, the Bush administration’s FY07 budget significantly underfunds many domestic programs that the most vulnerable in our society rely on for their very existence. Under the President’s budget, over the next 5 years [FY07-FY11] domestic funding [not including defense spending] would be cut by $183 billion below 2006 funding levels. Education funding would be cut significantly, with funding for special education to be cut by $5.5 billion and funding for Pell grants to be cut by $5.2 billion. Additionally, the President’s budget would cut funding for the National Institutes of Health [NIH], which funds health care research, by $13.3 billion. Funding for Veterans Medical Care and Hospital Services would be cut by $3.6 billion, and funding for the Community Oriented Policing Services [COPS] program, which funds state and local law enforcement efforts, would be cut by $1.7 billion. The decision to target these and many other programs reflects priorities and values that are very different from my own.

I am particularly concerned about the impact these proposed funding cuts would have on the state of Kansas. Under the President’s FY07 budget, over the next 5 years federal funding in Kansas for special education would be cut by $50 million, funding for Children and Family Services, including Head Start and the Community Services Block Grant, would be cut by $56 million, Community Development Block Grant [CDBG] funding would be cut by $41 million, and funding for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program [LIHEAP] would be cut by $16 million.

While funding for many critical priorities is being cut, spending in one area of the federal budget continues to grow significantly. Net interest payments on the exploding national debt are increasing every year, with no end in sight. Congress and the President should be working together to reduce the interest payments on our national debt, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office [CBO] predicts will total $184 billion in 2005 and grow to $289 billion by 2010. According to the CBO, “over the next five years, interest costs will grow significantly faster than noninterest spending in the federal budget. CBO projects that interest costs will increase by 57% during this time…” According to the numbers in the President’s budget, in FY07 the federal government will spend approximately $247 billion in net interest on the national debt, making interest payments on the debt the fourth largest expenditure in the federal government’s budget, behind only Social Security [$581 billion], the Department of Defense [$434 billion], and Medicare [$387 billion].

To put spending on debt interest payments in perspective, while interest on the debt will cost $247 billion in FY07, projected spending on homeland security and veterans combined will be only $65 billion. Spending four times more on debt interest than on protecting Americans at home and honoring our commitment to our veterans is a sign that our values need to be reevaluated.

Unfortunately, our country’s fiscal situation over the last few years has put us on an unstable, and unsustainable, path. In 2001, the Congressional Budget Office [CBO] predicted that the ten-year budget surplus would be $5.6 trillion. That projected ten-year surplus of $5.6 trillion has deteriorated into a projected $3.3 trillion deficit during the same period. That is an $8.9 trillion reversal in our country’s ten-year fiscal outlook.

Further, on February 17, 2004, the national debt of the United States exceeded $7 trillion for the first time in our country’s history. Two years later, our national debt is approximately $8.3 trillion. That comes down to approximately $28,000 per person in our country, and that is simply unacceptable.

If Congress continues to ignore the long-term consequences of our current fiscal policy, we will be forcing our children and grandchildren to pay a steep price for the deficits and debt we create today. Unfortunately, our current policies will impose a significant future tax increase on all Americans. The debt tax, which cannot be repealed, will have to be repaid by future generations, and I am deeply concerned that some in Washington have been unwilling to adjust their policies in response to changing conditions.

Deficits and an unsustainable level of debt also threaten to bring back higher long-term interest rates at an inopportune time for our economy. Those higher interest rates will increase payments on home mortgages and car loans and wind up hitting people with another tax now, not just in the future.

The Balanced Budget Amendment directs the president to submit a balanced budget to the Congress annually. Additionally, increasing the public debt limit would require a three-fifths vote of both chambers of Congress and tax increases could only be enforced through recorded votes of the House and Senate. A similar bill passed the House in 1995, but was defeated in the Senate by one vote. While this amendment would be virtually impossible to enforce, I have cosponsored this resolution in the past, and plan to do so again, because it has important symbolic value to our ongoing fight for fiscal discipline.

As a member of the fiscally conservative House Blue Dog Coalition and as a member of the House Budget Committee, I have promoted a balanced approach to our nation’s budget. The very first bill I introduced in Congress would have taken the Social Security trust funds “off budget.” I said the budget surpluses should be used to protect Social Security and Medicare, to begin to pay down our now-$7.7 trillion national debt, and to cut taxes. I have consistently voted for budgets that achieved those goals.

On January 31, 2001, almost a year before the terrorist attacks that changed our priorities so dramatically, my colleagues and I watched with alarm as the capital markets gave warning signals that the economy could not maintain its growth rate. In order to protect the integrity of fiscal discipline that had been hard fought and achieved in the mid- to late-nineties, I introduced legislation (H.Con.Res. 19) that urged Congress to use agreed-upon surplus, tax and spending figures in drafting its annual budget. This resolution also directed Congress to draft future budget resolutions by agreeing to the following set of principles:

1. Exclude Social Security and Medicare trust funds from the surplus;
2. Recognize the uncertainty of long term economic forecasting;
3. Make realistic assumptions regarding the future growth of discretionary spending;
4. Recognize the costs of policies that Congress historically reauthorizes such as expiring tax provisions and the cost of indexing the AMT to protect middle-class families; and
5. Recognize demographic pressures will create future obligations that will place pressure on our ability to enact responsible fiscal policy.

The Blue Dog Coalition proposed a budget alternative in 2003 that would have balanced the unified federal budget by 2009 and balanced the budget by 2013 without using Social Security receipts. The Blue Dog budget would have done this through a combination of spending restraint and deferring a portion of additional tax cuts.