A congressman from my district has been a true patriot throughout his first 210 days in the House of Representatives. Besides the fact that he has not missed a vote as a U.S. Representative or a State Representative, he has remained true to the standards he was elected on. He was one of only 22 Republican Congressman to vote "no" against the Boehner Bill on Friday and the Budget Control Act of 2011 on Monday.
He has a policy of posting every one of his votes along with a brief statement as to why he voted yes/no/present on his Facebook Page. After voting on Monday, he posted a statement on the failure of Congress to effectively address the detrimental debt problem our country finds itself in. It opens with:
The Budget Control Act trades $21 billion in cuts next year for a debt ceiling increase of $2.1 trillion. That’s one penny in cuts for each dollar of new debt. The bill does not seriously address the drivers of the federal government’s fiscal crisis.
I did not follow Congressman Amash much during his campaign, but later I did some quick research and have grown to like him more and more throughout his service.
As has become more and more apparent in recent months, only in Washington can you continue to spend more and pass it off as a budget cut. I don't know about my fellow YAL members, but if I talked to my credit card company and told them that I couldn't stop spending more than my budget, but I could slow my increase in spending, the answer would be "No, you have to pay your bills or your credit score will take a hit."
Speaker Boehner's plan is a sad excuse for the actual spending cuts our country desperately needs. An article by Chris Edwards at the CATO institute points this out with a chart of spending and a link to the letter from the Congressional Budget Office explaining that his plan in fact only cuts $850 million and not the $1.2 trillion the Speaker has claimed.
A disturbing realization is found in the following statement,
The “cuts” in the Boehner plan are only cuts from the CBO baseline, which is an assumed path of constantly rising spending. If Congress wanted to, it could require CBO to increase its “baseline” spending by, say, $5 trillion over the next decade. Then Boehner could claim that he was “cutting” spending by $5.9 trillion, even though his plan hadn’t changed. You can see that discretionary “cuts” against baselines don’t mean anything.
I wonder what the Founding Fathers would say if they were to come back and find Washington in the state it is today.
Just for some added fun, check out this video by ReasonTV.
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