Last Friday, the Congressional Budget Office scored President Obama’s ten-year budget plan. Their findings underscore a painful truth: The president is failing to engage in the kind of honest dialogue necessary to rally the country behind needed action.
His budget — widely criticized for growing our gross debt by $13 trillion, swelling our bloated bureaucracy, and ignoring our surging entitlements — is so filled with gimmicks and manipulations that the CBO found an additional $2.3 trillion in deficits beyond what the White House projected.
Advertisement
It is the most irresponsible spending plan put forward by a president in our time. It not only fails to change, but actually accelerates us along, our dangerous fiscal trajectory.
Yet the White House presents the budget as practically solving our fiscal nightmare. In what can only be described as an assault on the English language, the president and his budget director have boasted to the American people that under their budget we will “live within our means” and “not add more to the debt,” and that “we’re not going to spend any more money than we’re taking in.” In fact, the CBO finds that our annual deficits never once fall below $748 billion dollars. And they climb to $1.2 trillion in the tenth year.
Just imagine the fate a CEO would face if, in the process of asking for shareholders to invest in company stock, he declared that “we are not adding to the debt” while his accountants were telling him that the company’s debt would double.
We need honest, fact-based budgeting — not fantasy budgeting. That is the only way to dig ourselves out of this mess and to put our nation on the path to prosperity.
The co-chairmen of the president’s own fiscal commission declared that if we fail to take swift and serious action, our country faces “the most predictable economic crisis in its history.” They disagreed only on the timeline. Erskine Bowles estimated we had at least two years, while Alan Simpson estimated we had closer to one. Similar warnings have been sounded by experts across the country and the world.
But we cannot solve this problem if we do not even acknowledge it exists. We cannot curb our soaring deficits if the White House conceals them in its budget submission. And we cannot confront our fiscal crisis if our president remains unwilling to confront fiscal reality.
As I have said for many weeks, the president must look the American people in the eye and tell them the bitter truth about how badly their finances have been mishandled and how perilous it would be to remain on our current course.
It is no mystery what we have to do: reduce discretionary spending immediately and significantly, and then sustain these reductions over the coming years. Contrary to the Washington myth, such action will save vast sums of money and greatly ease our deficit burden. Tightening our discretionary budget will also make government leaner, more efficient, and more productive. And it will begin to restore investor confidence and spur job creation in the private sector.
We also need to restructure our tax code, energy policy, and regulatory apparatus so that they no longer penalize productivity.
In other words: Grow the economy, not the government.
Finally, we need to contain entitlement spending in a way that makes these programs sustainable — many lawmakers have presented valid ideas on how this can be achieved.
But, for any of this to happen, the president must recognize that the budget battle is not just another political fight. At stake is much more than the fate of any one politician, or any one political party. At stake is the financial future of every single American.
We know the threat. We know what we need to do. What we don’t know is what the president is waiting for.
America’s leaders have no higher duty, no greater moral responsibility, than to take all appropriate steps to protect the good people we serve from a clear and present danger.
— Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.) is a ranking member on the Senate Budget Committee.
How bad do things have to get, with our incompetent President, before Congress does something about it? This guy has to go, and long before November 2012.
R. S - Even presuming an impeachable offense, a Democrat majority in the Senate means we are stuck with Obama through 1213. What we desperately need is someone in the Republican party to make the case to the American People that government should not do everything that it can under permissive Supreme Court rulings, but rather it should do only what it can do that can't be done at any other level of government. Regulation of securities (SEC) and drugs (FDA) must be national. Each agency's performance can be greatly improved if they want to "keep the charter".
Agriculture, Energy, Education and many more can be divested. To give states a chance to transition, this should be done by changing the current funding to block grants for a five year period, with grants frozen at 2010 levels and reduced 20% per year.
Tell people the truth about entitlements. If we allowed people to save and invest what the government has taken in SS taxes (employer and employee), most people would be far ahead of the SS game and have assets they can leave to their children. We may need to keep tax receipts at least at current
levels during the transition, but the level of taxation needed to support the current system is absurd to contemplate.
Our fiscal situation is obvious to everyone, including the president. Given his background, and the principle of Occams Razor, it is plain to see that he desires an economic collapse of our country. The man is as anti-American as any politician in our history. It was a sad day for America when the electorate was foolish enough to elevate him to his present office.
Sen. Sessions, with all due respect to you sir. Our current President is not interested in the success of America or Americans, he has an agenda that is completely counter to your own.
Is it not obvious to you sir that President Obama is spending trillions of dollars in order to dig a hole too deep to get out of? Is it not obvious that the DOJ is no longer interested in Justice, but in a whole other agenda? The Fed has been corrupted and QE1 and QE2 probably QE3 and QE4 until the stock market utterly collapses from the false growth it currently enjoys as a result. Obama took on the debts of Freddie and Fannie and that only leaves another housing bubble as inevitable. Obamacare alone will lead to crushing additional debt.
This President is not interested in solving anything or improving anything, but he is interested in change. He will do everything he can to collapse our nation prior to 2012 elections taking place so he can declare Martial Law and himself Ruler. I know that sounds rather crazy and a bit nuts, but it is a much more intelligent set of assumptions than you have posted in your article here today. I believe my understanding of the situation is much closer to reality than yours.
We the people know, and understand the situation. I believe I could educate even you on the dire situation as I have been following it since 1986 when I wrote a thesis on these very matters. I knew then that by 2017 it would all be over economically due to the very issues we face today.
The only thing I didn't know was that we would elect a President at a time in our history that rather than deal with the problems, would be motivated in exploiting the problems and bring us to our knees, rather than rally the nation and have everyone make the sacrifices necessary to fix the problem.
We did not realize in 2008 that George Soros had 1,200 organizations that were all plotting this moment in our history. We did not realize in 2008 that Acorn, SEIU, Steve Lerner, Van Jones and the millions of people they represent were plotting for many years the arrival of Obama, Reid, and Pelosi to complete the destruction of our system of government. We do now though, perhaps too little too late if not for the House being taken back.
President Obama will not offer any help or hope for dealing with any of our ills while he is President. He has a 180 degree other mission and is moving his agenda along swiftly as the clock is ticking. Mr. Sessions do you know where George Soros will be in 10 days? You should, as it is the beginning of many events that will rapidly begin taking place between now and the 2012 elections. DOJ won't investigate any of it as Holder is plotting with them. Mr. Issa needs to step up to the plate and get up to speed on Steve Lerner, Van Jones, George Soros, and as crazy as it sounds, one of the ringleaders Nancy Pelosi.
Trying to fix our financial problems before 2012 is an impossible task as you simply do not have the partners with any interest in doing so. If you really want to fix our problems, you need to investigate these people so they can't complete their dream of bringing America down. We can then address our financial mess after 2012, if we make it that far by stopping their agenda's.
Well, if one more CR is passed or the debt ceiling is raised, if cow-pattie poetry or OBoehnerCare remains funded, if unions retain their elite status or elected officials are allowed to abandon their jobs and attain hero status, and the Court system continues to act without jurisdiction or fails to act swiftly when questions of Constatutionality are clear and inaction imperils the fiscal health (such as it is) of the National and State economies - I suggest we all join our elected leadership of these Insolvent States of America, and begin to enjoy living the "life of Riely."
Unfortunately, it will be as close to achieving the American Dream that any of our posterity will come.
We all knew what America would have been like had we fallen to the Nazis or the Soviets, but I wonder who will seize control here when our economy collapses? I'm betting we are less "Bedford Falls" and more "Pottersville", and we may consider "Pottersvile" as lucky.
It was, after-all, "A Wonderful Life!"
Reducing discretionary spending is swell, senator. Unfortunately, discretionary spending only accounts for roughly 1/3 of federal spending. If you're serious about reducing the debt (not just the deficit), you'll tackle the thornier issue of mandatory spending. If not, you're just another recreant Republican.
I am a traditionalist conservative. So whenver a GOP US senator start to ponfiticate about budgets, money, and the like, I almost automatically deprecate what they say. Why? Because very few GOP elected officials have any idea of underlying conservative principles. Either they are almost deliberately clueless about SOCIAL conservatism, or else they surreptitiously shy away from it because they are in constant campaign mode, and thus refuse to utter anything at which the Old Left Media could take offense. In effect they are utter cowards.
The sum total of these attitudes is the progressive tyranny we now are forced to live under. The reason Republicans have failed so miserably over the past decades to effectively confront progressivism, is that their only position amounts to “it costs too much”. This mantra ultimately falls on deaf ears because it triumphs no underlying principles, thus emasculating Republicans in the eyes of the general public.
As commentator Mark Steyn has pointed out (on these NRO pages, I believe), if the GOP is unable or unwilling to change, then the US will continue its drift into European-style socialism, and the GOP will be reduced to the role of “Christian Democrat” in which they no longer argue against the welfare state, but only on whether they can make it more efficient.
