Lankford: We need to Provide Certainty to the National Security Community on Sequestration

Washington, D.C. – Representative James Lankford (R-OK) spoke on the House floor this afternoon in support of H.R. 5872, the Sequestration Transparency Act of 2012.  The bill passed the House in a roll-call vote of 414-2 in yet another House action to provide certainty to the national security community in advance of the impending January 2013 cuts from the sequester.

Click here to watch

Representative Lankford: “At home, people have just a simple request of congress: Just do our job. Just do it. They’re tired of worrying about what dumb thing the federal government will do to them and their business and their family that will cause them even more pain. They just want us to identify the problem, fix it, and quit messing with all of the private business world. When a private business sees a threat on the horizon, they prepare for it. If it’s good, they ramp up hiring; they add more inventory; they increase training; they increase sales staff.  They get ready for something good. They take the entrepreneurial risk. If they see a threat on the horizon that looks bad, they pull back staff; they slow down internal purchases; they freeze inventory and hiring.

Two quick observations. One is this: right now, the national threat on the economic horizon is the federal government’s lack of hurry to resolve this manufactured crisis. We need to fix it now. The second thing is this: we’ve got to look up and see there is a financial crisis coming and prepare for it. If we wait until the last minute to act, it creates incredible uncertainty in our economy, and businesses and families can’t prepare for it. When we run all the way to the last minute and do something, we’ve already created all the economic uncertainty there.

So, here’s what this bill does. It requires that we actually plan for an economic crisis that we know is coming January 2, 2013. It pushes us to do what is essential right now.

Federal spending has dramatically increased as we approach $16 trillion in national debt and our fourth-straight year of trillion-dollar deficit spending. We should not guess or try to just make up the financial plan at the last minute. Some propose that we debt our way into prosperity or that we take even more money from one family and give it to another to make life fair. This bill just simply asks the President to let us know the plan. Let us know the consequences of sequestration. We know it’s a bad policy, but the Administration has not given us the details of how they will implement the sequestration.

Months ago the House Budget Committee, then the full House, worked with six committees to create a specific plan of how we were going to deal with this. We just want to know what OMB’s plan is and how things are going to be done. Get us information now.”

###

Contact: Kelly Ferguson 202.225.2132