Fiscal Responsibility
Changing the Way Washington Does Business
It's time to change the way Washington does business. We have to begin the long and difficult task of putting our nation's fiscal house in order. It won't happen overnight, but our long-term economic prosperity and security and our children's future depend on attacking the huge debt and deficits that threaten to cripple us.
A significant part of our debt was accumulated in just the past eight years. Washington provided record-breaking tax cuts targeting the few, fought two wars with no thought to financing either one, and ignored major structural problems such as skyrocketing health care costs.
Reforming Washington must start with one tried and true principle. We should return to Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) budgeting rules. PAYGO is a simple but effective concept: if you propose a new government program, you should also propose a way to pay for it. These budget enforcement rules helped create the surpluses we enjoyed only a decade ago, and we should reinstate them.
We must also set ourselves on the course to long-term deficit reduction, even as we make aggressive short-term investments - such as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act - necessary to avoid economic catastrophe and an even worse budget situation. As part of this process, I strongly supported the creation of a Bipartisan Fiscal Commission, which would have been tasked with creating long-term solutions to our deficits and debt. It would have created an expedited process for the Congress to vote on these recommendations. Unfortunately, it did not pass. In its place, the President appointed a similar commission and its findings are due at the end of the year. I also introduced legislation to place a ceiling on our yearly deficits of no more than 3% of the gross domestic product, and supported efforts to enact caps on discretionary spending.
We must deal seriously with the long-term costs of our entitlement programs. Part of the solution lies in the health care law that the President recently signed, which saves approximately $140 billion within the first ten years. I look forward to working with the President and my colleagues in Congress to preserve the integrity of Medicare and Social Security while reducing their increasingly large impact on the overall budget. The path to entitlement reform is a bipartisan one. We have to move past politics as usual - scaring beneficiaries and putting off tough but essential choices. When it comes to entitlements, the old battle lines are only making the problem worse.
We also need to be careful fiscal stewards. Waste, fraud and abuse in our government costs the country valuable resources at the toughest time. Every federal dollar should be well spent, and we have to be willing to make tough choices to improve government efficiency and accountability. We recently took an important step in addressing this problem in the Defense Department, which spends a huge amount of money in acquiring weapons, by enacting with strong bipartisan support the Weapons Systems Acquisition Reform Act to stop fraud and abuse in the defense procurement and contracting system. I look forward to identifying other ways in which we can make our government more effective and accountable.
These are some of the steps we have taken and should take to get our nation's budget back under control. These problems won't be fixed quickly or easily. But for the sake of future generations, we must set the course now toward fiscal responsibility.
