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Righting our Fiscal Ship COLUMBUS, OH – Congresswoman Deborah Pryce (R-Upper Arlington) today submitted the following editorial: For the better part of the past four years, a number of unforeseen and unavoidable events have applied incredible pressures upon our nation’s budget. While the causes of our spending problems are obvious – the terrorist strikes of 9/11; the subsequent need to completely reorganize and bolster our homeland security; the corporate accounting scandals; the bubble economy bursting; and two wars in the Middle East -- it has nonetheless been my unwavering goal to get our financial books back in order. Over the spring and summer, Congress was on track to do precisely that. We had just passed a responsible, pro-growth, forward-looking budget, and the Congressional Budget Office projected that the deficit would be reduced by nearly $100 billion. But with the one-two punch of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, this glide path to deficit reduction fell apart, as Congress rightfully appropriated $63 billion in emergency relief for the devastated Gulf Coast region. It is the foremost responsibility of the House to set the nation on the right fiscal course, and last week, with the passage of the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, the House righted the ship. For years, nearly every economist and newspaper editorial board across the nation has implored Congress to reform mandatory entitlement spending, which by 2015, is projected to consume 62% of the federal budget. Mandatory spending is the primary cause of our growing deficit, and currently 7 cents of each dollar you pay in taxes goes straight toward interest payments on our massive national debt. Eventually, mandatory spending will crowd out all other spending priorities, such as education, veterans, agriculture, and homeland security, leaving our nation utterly hamstrung and unable to control its own finances. By passing the Deficit Reduction Act, Congress has finally addressed this elephant in the room, saving the American taxpayer $50 billion over 5 years in mandatory spending. The bill has been subjected to unprecedented demagoguery and vilification by its opponents, who claim that it is a means of financing the recent tax cuts through “immoral cuts” to entitlement programs. This is nonsense. The seldom spoken truth of the matter is that the tax cuts have brought in additional tax revenue to the Treasury Department – an increase of 15% from last year. Equally important, the tax cuts ignited the economy, which grew at 3.8% in the 3 rd quarter of this year, and, for the first time since 1986, has sustained a two-and-a-half year stretch of uninterrupted quarterly growth over 3%. Since tax relief was signed into law, over 4.2 million new jobs have been created. Under the Deficit Reduction Act, mandatory spending will continue to grow at a rate of 6.3% per year – far faster than our economy, and more than twice the rate of inflation, and Medicaid will continue to grow by 7%. The bill simply slows the growth rate of mandatory spending by one-tenth of one percent over five years – certainly not ‘immoral,’ and most definitely not a ‘cut.’ In fact, the Deficit Reduction Act is not a clarion call asking the nation for shared sacrifice while we get our books in order. To the contrary, the reforms save and strengthen our entitlement programs, reduce waste fraud and abuse in government, and close loopholes in federal programs that cost taxpayers billions of dollars each year, simply by curtailing the geometric growth of mandatory spending by a fraction of a percent. The bill is responsible, appropriate, and absolutely necessary. To bury our heads in the sand and pass along to our children a government drowning in debt and emasculated with mandatory spending would be, well, ‘immoral.’ |
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