GDP: Growing Democrats' Program
Washington,
Jun 23 -
It’s astounding how the Democrats in Washington have broken their promise to change Congress. We recently marked an ominous milestone in our nation’s fiscal history when the Obama Administration announced that the U.S. debt hit a record $13 trillion. By the end of the year the U.S. debt is expected to nearly equal the size of the U.S. economy, a level many experts warn will jeopardize our economic prosperity.
In the Obama – Pelosi – Reid era, the acronym G.D.P. has taken on a whole new meaning: Growing Democrats’ programs!
The dire warnings of economists and the vivid lessons of Greece and other debt-laden European countries collapsing under the weight of their cradle-to-grave welfare system have done nothing to restrain the Democrats in Washington. They fail to heed the warnings from abroad and continue to simply declare every spending proposal an “emergency” to justify their fiscal irresponsibility.
For example, the Obama Administration had the audacity to ask Congress to approve a second stimulus in emergency funding to aid state and local governments – even though the first stimulus included $53 billion for the “State Fiscal Stability Fund,” which included nearly $40 billion for school districts to prevent teacher layoffs and program cuts.
In the dark of night, the Administration fired off a letter demanding that they need Congress to pass a second infusion of federal funding to prevent sweeping layoffs at the local government level. Americans don’t want, need or deserve a second stimulus! The Democrats need to get real about spending and stop acting like money grows on trees.
In just over a year and a half in the Oval Office, President Obama has added more than $4 trillion to the scheduled federal spending – sparked by jamming through a stimulus, passing the $2.5 trillion government-run healthcare plan, bailing out the auto industry, and rescuing Wall Street, among other things. He’s driven the annual budget deficit from $467 billion in 2008 to nearly $1.6 trillion in 2010 and pushed the national debt from $10.6 trillion to $13 trillion. It’s no wonder as the amount of the nation debt owed by each man, woman and child in the United States has spiked to $42,310.
As a constitutional conservative with grave concerns with the Democrats’ out-of-control spending, I support a different plan. I say balance the budget, cut the deficit, pay down the debt and grow the economy. You do that by freezing non-defense discretionary spending, reforming entitlement spending, lowering taxes on hard-working Americans and increasing tax incentives for small businesses so they have more money to hire people for quality, lasting jobs.
A key component of slashing federal spending is shrinking the size of the public sector, not expanding it! That’s why I recently introduced legislation to freeze federal hiring, the Federal Workforce Reduction Act, H.R. 5348. It’s been over a year since the Democrats passed the so-called Stimulus promising to keep unemployment below 8%. The unemployment rates hovers just under 10%. The latest jobs report that came out showed that 96% of the new jobs were government jobs – and most of them were temporary jobs at the Census. How uninspiring!
My bill would institute an immediate freeze in non-national security hires and would reduce the size of government by attrition. For every 100 employees who retire or otherwise end their service in non-defense related jobs, the federal government can only hire 50 new employees.
According to political analyst, Michael Barone, “One-third of last year's $787 billion stimulus package was aid to state and local governments -- an obvious attempt to bolster public-sector unions. And a successful one: While the private sector has lost 7 million jobs, the number of public-sector jobs has risen. The number of federal government jobs has been increasing by 10,000 a month.” And we’re still in a recession. That’s just gross. What is also gross is knowing that the second stimulus is one more payback to government employee unions. Enough is enough!
Taxpayers — and the next generation that will be paying the bill for this federal spending bonanza — must decide for themselves if they're getting their money's worth.
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