Saving Our Nation from Debt: An Open Letter from Rep. Jim Jordan
To My Fellow Americans,
Uncle Sam is spending you into the poorhouse. Taxes, inflation, unemployment, interest rates — all could skyrocket if Washington keeps spending trillions of dollars it doesn’t have. Unless we begin to cut spending now (a lot of spending) these four horsemen of debt will ride roughshod over families and businesses already struggling to get by. Fortunately, we still have a chance to kick the spending addiction and keep the American Dream alive.
What Can’t Go on Forever, Won’t
Between 2007 and today, total federal spending rose by almost 36%. Meanwhile, taxpayers’ personal budgets have headed in the opposite direction. From 2007 to 2009 (the latest data available), median family income actually fell by 4.2%.
As a result, the federal deficit will top $1.6 trillion this year — fueling the increasingly rapid rise of our $14 trillion national debt. It should be obvious to all that today’s reckless spending cannot go on forever. But under the budget recently proposed by President Obama, the federal government never comes close to living within its means. In ten years, his plan sees the national debt almost doubling to $26 trillion. If the president’s economic predictions prove too rosy (as his stimulus predictions certainly did), the problem gets even worse.
Picture a family that earns $50,000 while spending $80,000 — every single year. Eventually, this family’s budget will get smaller. Just like Uncle Sam, the only question is whether they cut back now and on their own terms, or later, with far worse options and much more pain. People know it will take tough love to get the federal budget into balance. What they don’t yet know is whether their elected leaders will have the courage to deliver.
The Road Ahead
If Senate Democrats accept Americans’ call for lower spending, Congress will soon avoid a government shutdown and agree on funding levels for the last 7 months of this budget year. But bigger battles await. Sometime in the next few months, Washington will hit its legal limit for borrowing. And before October 1, 2011, Congress must write a budget for next year. Our response to these challenges will determine whether Uncle Sam devours our economy with debt or helps it grow by slimming down and getting out of the way.
The coming budget and debt ceiling debates represent the last real chance to cut spending and keep our economy competitive for the 21st century. A starting point for discussion should be the Republican Study Committee’s plan to cut nearly $2.5 trillion of “discretionary spending” (the part of the budget that funds federal agencies) over the next ten years. Still, our Spending Reduction Act is just a head start in the race to save the economy from crippling debt. To get to the finish line, we’ll have to go farther.
The big budget challenges are in so-called “mandatory spending” or entitlement spending (which accounts for nearly 60% of the budget). Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security were all created as a safety net for the most vulnerable in our society. Over the decades, however, expanded eligibility and benefits and longer life expectancy have stretched this net to its breaking point. Sadly, President Obama’s budget is completely silent on how to save these programs from their current path to bankruptcy. If the country does not act soon to reform and preserve this safety net, the people who need it most will suffer the consequences.
The Courage of Our Convictions
A few weeks ago, the House Appropriations Committee unveiled legislation to reduce spending for the remainder of the 2011 budget year. While we appreciated their good work, members of the Republican Study Committee also knew that more needed to be done. We sent the bill back to the drawing board, and as a result the House recently voted to cut total spending by more than $61 billion this year, or $100 billion below the president’s request. Now it goes to the Senate.
Although last week’s vote to cut spending was only the first step of many, it should have been a bigger step. To keep this country a land of opportunity and innovation, representatives, senators, and the president himself will need to work together to make the large spending cuts necessary to get the budget on a path to balance. Nearly every politician talks about the dangers of unchecked deficits and debt. In 2011, Americans will learn who has the courage of their convictions.
As we see today in Wisconsin, the Left will fight vigorously to kick the can down the road one more time. At this moment, however, we stand at a fork in the road. Down one path wait higher taxes, rising inflation, painful interest rates, and fewer jobs. Down the other, the chance for individuals, families, and businesses to build a healthier, more prosperous future.
No choice could be easier to make.
God Bless,
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH)
Chairman, the Republican Study Committee
http://rsc.jordan.house.gov/
I do not think that Americans’ call for lower spending specifically included Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security nor turning everyday citizens against each other in all out campaigns to bash government workers throughout our nation into oblivion.
Americans, I believe specifically meant for members of Congress to change their mindset and behavior patterns so that they no longer pose an omni present danger and threat to every individual and enterprise in our country.
To put it another way I don’t believe Americans; particularly the Tea Party folks put forth the enormous efforts they have so that elected officials can turn around shortly and say to them, “Look at me, I put a some garbage out to the curb, but there is a lot left.” while their house keeping is still the same old sweep the dirt and trash under the carpet routine it has been for decades.
I believe that Americans right now are enduring economic stress in the forms of destroyed home mortgages, reduced salaries, impending job losses, super high prices in the super markets and at the gas pumps, increased medical costs and liabilities with no realistic chance for relief and hope about any of it in the near or distant future.
I believe that American citizens have been subjected to one of the most torturous and wicked pitting of human beings against human beings that has ever existed with it comes to living with and solving the illegal Hispanic immigrants problem. The economic ramifications of this are staggering; yet while Americans rightfully expected their elected officials to step up to the plate on their behalf, the opposite continues to be the normal mode of operation for Congress.
Earlier I mentioned that Americans believe that the government poses an omni present danger and threat to every individual and enterprise in our country. But, at the same time I believe that they are convinced that the majority of this would be eliminated if the government simply got out of the way of the people it is supposed to serve instead of hammering and suffocating them with endless laws, restrictions and taxes.
At this writing we are living in the most dangerous period of time we have ever faced. The oil supplies for the majority of the world are in extreme jeopardy meaning that the world tonight could easily explode into all out war, including the use of nuclear weapons. When it concerns our National Defense I do not believe that Americans are seeing the kind of mature leadership in Washington that our nation needs to effectively deal with this.
In summary and respectfully I do not believe that Americans are seeing any noteworthy fork in the road at this juncture. I believe that they understand that they, the people are being asked to carry another 100 billion dollar load by a Congress that hasn’t made a dimes worth of change to itself.
0 and the donkeys will not lower spending since they believe that will please their constituents more and thus buy them more votes. Remember, “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” This is why we hear Chuckyboy Schumer trumpeting the idea and a “freeze on today’s spending will lead to a reduction in the deficit.” Nonsense, but the donkey’s clarion call to its followers.
We need leadership, and a leadership with courage which is not merely interested in remaining in power. That leadership, and that courage, needs to take us, to borrow from Robert Frost, along “the path less followed.”
HA! By a ratio of about 9:1 Americans, their communities and industry are dependent on federal goverment spending. Community grants, education grants, R&D grants, indusrial subsidies, agriculture subsidies, mortgage subsidies, tax exceptions, FDIC, flood insurance, FEMA, food stamps, unemployment, Highways, Postal service, AMTRAK, the arts, and the such before we ever get to the biggies like social security, medicare, SSI, medicaid, etc.
Everybody has all the tough ‘stop spending’ rhetoric until they figure out it might impact their own lives or their communities. Mostly, American’s haven’t a clue of how much they have become reliant on federal goverment handouts….GOVERNMENT SPENDING!
Republicans are not serious about the deficit and the debt because you still have too many legacy inside the beltway representatives who think they can thread this needle with bull shit. You too keep up the big talk about $2.5 trillion in cuts over 10 years. Stop it!! You will not be around in 10 years and once negotiations start, you will magically cut nothing in year one and $2.5 trillion in year 10 and declare victory.
The spending level today is $3.7 trillion. Do you hear me. Any true budget cutting serious person would cut THAT number by at least $500 billion today. Do an across the Board 20% reduction of everthing except social security. There are so many programs that need to eliminated it should be like shooting ducks in a pond. Go ahead and identify these eliminations and the employees who occupy these departmeents adn tell them to start looking NOW!!
We need serious people for a serious job. So far the efforts of the house republicans are very pathetic and unworthy of the effor to get some of these bozos elected.
Get on with it or get out!!
Tommy Gunn
It’s bizarre to see the battle lines drawn at a mere $100b when the deficit is a trillion+. I understand legislative realities, up to a point, but $100b is not such a cut as will forestall really painful choices. T.T. Thomas correctly raises the “whose ox is to be gored” point. Probably $100b is about all the traffic will bear in the absence of a real “day of infamy” speech. And it will be a cold day in Hell before Obama’s teleprompter unwinds anything like that.
Probably only an across-the-board x% cut will be the only solution that will fly. The factional divides that will come with selective cuts will doom that approach at the outset.
It’s only going to get worse. The $100b isn’t going to get ‘er done. Soaring oil and food prices, a collapse of the Euro, and Middle East turmoil will do more to reset thinking than all the effort to be “rational” about soaring debt and spending.
The orgy of spending will stop it is just a question of when. (In medicine we have a ghoulish maxim that “bleeding always stops”…whether pre-mortem or post-mortem!)
The Dems are demogoguing the issue to our detriment and possible demise.
It is time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.
Congressman Jordan,
Please run against Sherrod Brown for the Senate next year.
—from a Columbus resident
“Sadly, President Obama’s budget is completely silent on how to save these programs from their current path to bankruptcy.”
So what’s your plan for non-discretionary spending? The house GOP budget doesn’t address the gorilla. What’s truly sad is that Republicans won’t tackle America’s real spending problem to get our house in order.
To kick the spending addiction one may wish to look at the 12 step program for politicians and the political mood. The first step or obstacle is “denial.” At this time the protesters and the MSM advocate that the budget crisis either does not exist or is someone else’s problem. Cristy and Walker et al have been perfectly clear about which part of “broke” don’t you understand, yet they preach to progressively deaf ears and over mob noise.
The minimum budgets to keep governments,state and federal, open for a month become working examples of fiscal base line necessity. After that comes the services that are like the fat which could be trimmed. The largest issues of medicare and social security are historically abused contracts between payors and government which need to at first remove the violations of those contracts. At the state level, the special interests of i.e. the unions, need to be reconciled with the interests of of the non-union constituants. That provides equal opportunity under the laws which have been bent.
The American people fell for the largest Ponzi scheme in history with Social Security. Now…what happens when Grandma who lives alone and has no family and receives a little tiny SS check to pay the rent and buy meager groceries doesn’t get her money? Or Joe who lost a leg in an industrial accident doesn’t get his Disability check? Or Mike who has heart problems and can’t work doesn’t get his check? Do you think the average American will help Granny or Joe or Mike pay da rent? HELL NO. As far as the average American is concerned, these people can all die and their bodies can go unburied. The average American says that these people are sucking the economy dry.
But then who are the REAL bloodsuckers? How about the Congress that votes itself a pay raise whenever it gets a chance. How about the asinine and sometimes redundant programs the government sets up? How about the unions who demand more than they’re worth? How about the flood of illegal aliens sucking the states’ budgets dry. The welfare cheaters; those who get welfare but have under the table work? The deadbeat fathers who fail to pay the support for their multiple kids because they can’t keep their penis in their pants? The prisoners who bilked the USG out of hundreds of thousands by claiming tax credits they were not eligible for? How about a President who sends $150 million to Egypt, a nation in crisis?
If the American government keeps pissing on the heads of the American people and telling them it’s raining, they will eventually get a lesson in the Second Amendment that they’ve been trying to destroy for so long.
The problem is, and continues to be while the rich have paid zero taxes since the disastrous Reagan tax cuts in the early 1980′s the same greedy pigs hold most of the savings bonds and treasury bills that make up most of the national debt. Defaulting on the national debt would only affect the rich since the American worker has no assets at all. After that, we could seize the trust funds of the greedy billionaires like the Koch brothers and raise their taxes up to the pre-Reaganite levels and we could easily provide health, food, housing, transportation, and income for all.
Plus a flat screen TV and a new car.
And what incentive does that leave the Koch brothers, or anyone else, to generate revenue, purchase raw materials, sell products and services, invest in new enterprise, and employee others? Think through what you just said: what do you do once you’ve milked the billionaires dry and hocked their investments and savings (you did say seize their trust funds) for a bunch of giveaways for the rest of the nation? Do you just assume there is an endless supply of billionaires to rob? Or can you see that maybe your plan would destroy what little remains of a wealth-generating culture, and within a generation the rich you’ll be robbing will be the lucky ones who have shoes, not trust funds.
Please be advised that all modern tax problems considered unfair by those that feel oppressed arose when the door was opened to promote tax slavery for all that cannot afford parasitic lobbyists or lawyers via the sixteenth amendment to the United States Constitution allowing the Congress to levy an income tax without apportioning it among the states or basing it on Census results. This amendment exempted income taxes from the constitutional requirements regarding direct taxes, after income taxes on rents, dividends, and interest were ruled to be direct taxes in Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Co. (1895). It was ratified on February 3, 1913.
This was closely followed on December 23, 1913 with the Act of Congress that created the Federal Reserve System, the central banking system of the United States of America and granted it the legal authority to issue legal tender.
At this point in time the trap was set to allow a growing horde of economic parasites to consume all that could ever be provided by the income tax..
The fallacy of ever “operating in the black” has been misconstrued to represent periods when collected taxes exceed the interest accruing on the national debt without ever mentioning the unpaid principal sum and explains how the economy has declined under such treasonous deception.
When you can escape community organizational half truth and beating a dead horse, try using the internet to uncover the “rest of the story”. Then accept that taxes like all other operating expenses are simply tagged onto the sale price of any product created by investments of the rich to be paid by the consumer. THAT MEANS YOU.
Yobbin::
There is more wrong than right there, but there is an arrow in it pointing to the truth.
Unfortunately it does no good to blame ‘the rich’ because it holds no real answer (most are only ‘rich’ on paper)– in fact is the promised wealth that can never be delivered coupled with the loss of wealth as it has been squandered and used against us and what has been withheld from their righful owners that causes all the pain and fears of disaster; it is from ignoring the simple fact that the true wealth is of and in the people; because so many are now lost as contributors to their own existence to even be a part of the ecology/economy of what is still a great nation — so controlled by a willful few who see themselves greater for imposed scarcity and deprivation on all others.
It is not enough to damn even these real criminals in print or in a loud voice — what it does require is the very action, daily, of what formed this nation: the exercise of all freedoms endowed, with respect for those of our fellows: ask yourself, what have I done to assure honesty and give room for trust and why is there such a market for propaganda if it is a government of the people?
We must finally admit, there is no real alternaive to shooting looters, philosophically or otherwise.
Have a nice day.
Let me see, at last look, the top 1% of income earners paid 48% of all income taxes. Do I need to suggest the rest of your rant is just as far from the truth?
I do. It is.
Just as hideous is the fact that 50% do not pay into the Federal system while 60% take from.
America, we must admit the inside of our cup is filthy and it is time to clean up the mess made.
We MUST take drastic steps now; we’ll never have a better chance! Cuts won’t help, we’ve got to start phasing out the federal government on a wholesale level.
Raise SS retirement eligibility to 75 for all under 55.
Start cutting whole departments out of Washington.
Stop lying to people: tell the under 30 crowd that there will be no social security for them, so plan accordingly. Fess up that we are going to keep taxing them, but stop calling it social security.
Tell the under-30 crowd there will be no medicare or medicaid for them, so plan accordingly.
Rescind the Medicare part D that GWB passed.
Start dumping state responsibilities back on states. Yeah, it’ll cause chaos, but they’ll figure it out and get through it.
If we try to nibble around the edges of this behemoth, we’re doomed!
Now, where’s the Senator or Representative with the backbone to say this?
bubblehead::
You are quite right —
We ask for those with cojones and we get the ones with castanets.
They cannot be a part of the solution, being such a large part of the problem in the first place.
Time to cut them off and set them adrift.
Play time has been over for some years and the situation now can put us all in the ER at the same time.