GUEST COLUMN: Massive deficits, and Congress can't even approve a budget
By Doug Lamborn
It’s now official. House Democrats have for the first time in the modern era failed to enact a House budget. It is a decision made deliberately. To vote on a budget that includes debt projections, imperils Democrats in swing districts. This is because most of them would end up going on the record supporting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s and President Barack Obama’s plans for excessive spending and borrowing.
When he was in the minority in 2006, current Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt said, “If you can’t budget, you can’t govern.” This is elemental. Every family and every business knows that you have to look at income, weigh it against expenses, and then make the tough choices of what takes priority. It is part of the dysfunctional spending syndrome in Washington that Democrat leaders like Spratt now feel they can operate without the constraints of a budget. This is madness.
The American people have caught on to Obama and the liberal Congressional leadership’s fiscal philosophy of spending like there is no tomorrow. The only question remaining is, do Democrats really believe their own spin? Are they true believers in Obama-nomics like House Whip James Clyburn, who said, “We have to spend our way out of the recession?” Or are they suppressing what they must know about the destructive effects of massive national debt in a desperate attempt to hold on to power? I continue to wonder.
Can they really believe the words coming out of their own mouths? Pelosi said recently that going further into debt to yet again extend unemployment benefits, already longer than at any time in our nation’s history, “creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name.” Apart from the question of whether it’s the role of the federal government to borrow money to meet every humanitarian need that comes along, how can anyone say that making it easier to continue without a job creates jobs? And how does more borrowing help the economy? This way of thinking defies sound economic policy and defies common sense.
The election in November is shaping up to be a referendum on the current Washington philosophy of going heavily into debt, burdening our children and grandchildren and eroding our standing in the world, to pursue ill-advised, short-term benefits for groups and cronies favored by Democrats. November may be America’s last chance to save the ship of state before it capsizes under unsustainable debt.
Incredibly, Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner are still going around saying the so-called stimulus was the only thing that saved us last year, and that we need more of the same. If unprecedented borrowing was the path to prosperity, joblessness would have gone down, not up. If debt made a country stronger, Greece would be healthy and not a basket case.
Sound economists and even rating agencies have begun raising the warning flags, saying we are perilously close to reaching that point in time where lenders such as China will no longer be able or willing to enable us to continue our spendthrift ways. The Congressional Budget Office says that our national debt will be 90 percent of the gross domestic product by 2020. Greece got into serious trouble at 110 percent.
How can we keep talking about bailing out financial institutions, for instance, which Rep. Barney Franks’ recently passed financial “reform” bill will continue to do, when we as a country are going to need a bailout? Not only are bailouts unfair to those who acted responsibly and are asked to pick up the tab for those who were not, but when it comes to the U.S., we are simply too big to bail out.
One-and-a-half trillion dollar annual deficits, where 43 cents of every federal dollar spent is borrowed from future generations, is the ultimate in irresponsibility. I am ashamed that Congress and the administration cannot even draft a simple budget.
Doug Lamborn is the representative from Colorado’s 5th Congressional District.
