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Spending cuts, not scare tactics

We can cut spending without a government shutdown

By Congresswoman Virginia Foxx

Have you heard the talk about a government shutdown?  If so, allow me to be blunt.  Such talk is a scare tactic.  There is no need for a government shutdown.  What we need are spending reductions. 

A government shutdown is the preferred bogeyman of those who refuse to accept the reality that the federal government is broke and in need of a house cleaning.   The people talking about a government shutdown are the same people who won’t consider a single spending cut, but instead want to make the 24% spending increases of the past two years the new normal. 

America can’t afford to make the current, expensive federal budget the “new normal.”   Rather, we must ask tough questions about the size and role of the federal government, because government has gotten too big. 

In fact, nowhere is the over-sized nature of the federal government more apparent than in the enormous federal budget deficit.  Recent projections predict a $1.65 trillion deficit for 2011, which make the national debt larger than the size of our entire economy. 

Instead of burying our collective heads in the sand by locking in these unsustainable spending levels, we must fund government as a level we can afford.  That’s why in late February, I voted for, and the House passed, a bill that funded the government for the rest of the year while cutting spending by $61 billion, or $100 billion below the President’s request. 

Unfortunately, the Senate is refusing to take up this government funding bill and is instead trying to push another bill that locks in 2010 spending levels without cutting a dime.  Such a refusal to consider even minor spending cuts illustrates an important point: all the talk about a government shutdown is just a smoke screen for perpetuating massive amounts of federal spending. 

The House has already begun to tackle Washington’s over-spending, starting with the $61 billion in spending reductions that passed last month.  Even before this bill passed, I also voted to cut Congressional budgets, my own included, by $35 million.  Plus I voted to ban all spending earmarks, to end taxpayer funding of presidential election campaigns and party conventions, to reclaim $180 million in wasted funding from UN tax fund and to repeal $2.6 trillion in new spending under Obamacare. 

Reasonable people can disagree about where to cut spending and by how much.  But insisting on no spending cuts in the face of the largest budget deficit in history is not an option.  The simple truth is that the sooner we face up to our dire financial situation and start to cut spending, the less painful the cuts will be. The inverse is also true.  The longer we wait, the more it will hurt and the more debt we will pass on to the next generation. 

We’ve got a choice.  We can avoid tough decisions to rein in the growth of the federal government and pass the buck one more time or we can do something historic and actually put America back on the path to prosperity and economic growth by pruning back the thicket of federal fiefdoms, programs and bureaucracies.  I am choosing the path to prosperity.

Food for thought when considering spending cuts: “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined.  Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.”  -- James Madison, 1788