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A Fourth of July recipe for reduced freedom:
Congress takes more of your hard-earned money

By Congresswoman Virginia Foxx

The Fourth of July is a time to do more than just take in the fireworks and parades. It is also an opportunity for me to reflect on the Founding Fathers’ experiment in liberty and the sacrifices they made to secure our freedoms. As they struggled to break free of the oppressive government of England, the Founders knew the fight for independence and freedom could take their very lives.

When he pledged “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” along with each of the Declaration of Independence’s signers, Thomas Jefferson grasped the true cost of freedom. Yet Jefferson knew that freedom is a fragile thing. Years after the July 4, 1776 signing of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson wrote that, “the natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”

His centuries-old wisdom is borne out by Washington’s spending habits. Federal spending is a direct reminder of how our freedoms are threatened by the cash grab in Congress. Congressional debates over hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars almost always neglect the issue of personal freedom, even though every last dollar is taken from the taxpayers’ wallets. Whenever Congress rings up another government program on the federal cash register, it is the American taxpayer who foots the bill.

This year, the federal government will put taxpayers on the hook for $2.9 trillion, absconding with approximately a fifth of the total United States economy—an amount that is larger than the economy of any nation except Japan. This massive tally adds up to one thing: a corresponding loss of freedom for average, taxpaying North Carolinians.

For instance, in mid-June Congress voted on a spending bill that funds much of our nation’s foreign operations. The bill provided money for things like the United Nations and the World Organization for Animal Health. It weighed in at more than $34 billion, an increase of 9.4 percent over last year’s funding levels.

I voted against the bill because it increased funding for the United Nations and its affiliated agencies by approximately 15 percent to the tune of $100 million. Seems like a lot of money to throw at an international body routinely accused of corruption that is viewed by many as an ineffective global complaints department.

A 15 percent boost to the UN is one small example of Congress expanding the scope of government. As Congress tasks the federal government with ever more and ever larger roles, average citizens in North Carolina slowly see their freedoms whittled away.

Independence Day is an occasion to reexamine the current “a dollar here and a dollar there” mentality. Such thinking encourages the erosion of individual liberty as spending on government programs supplants personal freedom. Fighting this quiet erosion of freedom is sometimes unpopular. But the legacy of freedom we inherited from our forebears demands nothing less.

Bloated spending bills are winding their way through Congress and soon will be up for a vote. Each new dollar of government spending, to say nothing of billions of dollars of new spending, is another blow to the freedom of every hard-working North Carolinian.

Lest we forget, new spending is soon followed by the bitter pill of higher taxes. Perhaps as our wallets grow slimmer, the outcry against new spending will grow louder. In the meantime, I promise to fight wasteful and excessive federal spending in the annual spending bills in order to preserve our waning freedoms.

Virginia Foxx is a United States Representative from North Carolina’s Fifth Congressional District. You may contact her office toll free at 1-866-677-8968 or e-mail her from her website, www.foxx.house.gov.