EarlPomeroy

Fiscal Responsibility

At the end of the last century, our country was enjoying record federal budget surpluses. By the end of the decade, driven by two wars that weren’t paid for, a large tax cut aimed at the richest Americans, and a national recession, those surpluses had turned to deep deficits. I believe our budget deficits are a critical problem, and we need to take strong and swift action to get our books balanced once again.

As a member of the Blue Dog Coalition, I have long advocated for fiscal responsibility and budget discipline so that Congress will have to act like every American family does when making its spending decisions. It is common sense that if you spend an extra dollar in one place, you need to spend a dollar less elsewhere.  If you remodel the kitchen, you have got to cut back on the vacation.

That’s why I was a strong supporter of restoring Pay-As-You-Go rules in law. These rules tell the federal government that if it wants to put more funding into one area of the budget, it must reduce the amount spent elsewhere.   When last adopted in the early 1990s, Pay-As-You-Go rules played a key role in turning the federal budget deficits that had become customary into a record federal surplus by the year 2000. Once the rule was allowed to expire in the early 2000s, the budget quickly returned to deep deficits.

I have also fought to create a bipartisan deficit reduction commission to make recommendations that would reduce the federal deficit. I believe the work of this commission will provide a path forward to putting our budget back on track.