Posted on 05/11/2011 6:35:33 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
As I traveled across Pennsylvania last year, I promised Pennsylvanians that I would dedicate myself to two key priorities in the United States Senate: restoring economic growth and private-sector job creation, and putting our federal government on a sustainable fiscal path.
These two goals are inextricably connected. We cannot maximize economic growth without getting our government’s finances in order. And we can’t get our finances in order if we don’t have the courage to make serious and tough choices right now.
Today, we are barreling toward a fiscal crisis like a downhill freight train. A few weeks ago, Standard & Poor’s essentially threatened to downgrade the United States’ AAA credit rating unless policymakers reduce our budget deficits. This announcement stunned the political and financial world, but after years of reckless spending it should not have come as a surprise.
In only the past decade — since 2000 — total federal spending has doubled. Last year’s level reached 24 percent of our nation’s economy — a post-WWII record and far higher than recent years have averaged. This spending surge has resulted in massive, record-breaking deficits. As recently as 2007, our deficit was only 1.2 percent of our gross domestic product. This year it is over 9 percent, or $1.4 trillion. Our government is borrowing about 40 cents of every dollar it spends.
The recent, huge deficits have, inevitably, created a mountain of debt. Over the past 20 years, our debt had remained fairly constant as a percentage of our national output, averaging about 41 percent of GDP. Today it’s 64 percent. It’s going to be 69 percent of GDP by October. This trajectory is clearly unsustainable.
President Obama and congressional Democrats have refused to show the leadership our country needs. The president’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2012 includes massive tax increases that will strangle job creation when our country is still struggling with an unacceptably high unemployment rate. His budget only exacerbates our fiscal crisis, adding $9.5 trillion to our national debt over the next ten years. And the president’s budget is silent on the major entitlement programs that are driving our medium-term deficits.
But at least the president proposed a budget, however inadequate. That is more than can be said for the Democratic-controlled Senate, which appears poised to go a second consecutive year without passing any budget at all.
This is an abdication of leadership that has to end. We need real spending cuts now, along with programmatic entitlement reforms and pro-growth tax policies. Together, they will put our government on a sustainable fiscal path and our economy in a strong growth mode. Congress needs to demonstrate the ability and the will to balance the federal budget within a reasonable time frame.
That is why I am introducing, along with a number of my Senate Republican colleagues, a responsible and commonsense budget for fiscal year 2012 that balances the budget in nine years.
My budget reaches a $50 billion surplus in 2021. It does so by gradually reducing spending to 18.5 percent of GDP and recognizing the strong economic growth that would accompany restored fiscal discipline and pro-growth tax policy. It reduces our publicly held debt from this year’s 69 percent of GDP to 52 percent by 2021. In short, it demonstrates that it is possible to balance our budget without job-crushing tax increases.
While Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid all require structural reforms soon, it is neither necessary nor politically feasible to take them all on at once. Focusing on just the current ten-year budget window, my budget makes no changes to Social Security. Changes to Medicare are limited to restoring the fictitious and unspecified cuts projected in the president’s budget. For Medicaid, we adopt an approach similar to that of the House budget — block-granting Medicaid funding to the states at reduced levels, while giving the states flexibility to devise their own systems for providing health care to the poor.
For defense spending, my budget adopts an approach similar to the one in the House-passed budget and the president’s budget. My budget, however, gradually phases out funding for the wars in Iraq in Afghanistan by 2018. Non-defense discretionary spending is reduced to 2006 levels and frozen for the subsequent six years. Mandatory spending apart from the big three entitlement programs is gradually reduced to slightly above 2007 levels by 2014, and then allowed to grow at the rate of consumer prices, with certain particularly misguided programs such as farm subsidies taking bigger cuts.
Reducing our deficit is just one part of the plan to get our economy moving again. Like the House-passed budget, my budget calls for job-creating, across-the-board tax reform that will enable us to dramatically accelerate economic growth.
I propose to dramatically simplify the tax code by eliminating special-interest tax credits and carve-outs for politically chosen winners. My budget would consolidate the current six individual-income-tax brackets into three, cut the top individual- and corporate-tax rates to 25 percent, and index the Alternative Minimum Tax for inflation. It would also move us to a territorial tax system so that we would no longer hinder economic growth by subjecting overseas profits of American corporate subsidiaries to double taxation.
I am not aware of any country that has ever dramatically grown its government, spent well beyond its means, run massive deficits, accumulated huge debts, monetized large portions of them, and then lived happily ever after. We won’t be the first. We will either stay on our current path and suffer the inevitable consequences of fiscal crisis and economic stagnation, at best; or we will change course and adopt the fiscal discipline and pro-growth reforms that will allow another American century.
The time to choose is now. And time is running out.
— Pat Toomey represents Pennsylvania in the United States Senate.
Discretionary spending is for “them” (congress).
SS and MC are for “us”.
Notice how all the focus is on cutting SS and MC ?
No elimination of DOE, or any other Dept. Most curious.
Not really. Which Congressmen have offered bills that eliminate a Dept completely ?
*sniff*
I smell RINO dung.
I voted for Toomey, but to paraphrase Moochelle my Belle; Today, after reading this article, is the first time I have actually been PROUD of Mr. Toomey!
RE: I smell RINO dung.
Could you kindly elaborate?
Being from Pennsylvania, it’s nice to have a real Senator again...
More BS from the republicans, a gradual reduction in spending, by increasing taxes. That does not reduce this damn bloated government on bit little Toomy.
His so called reduction is computed as a percentage of GDP for ten years from now, means with GDP growth there is no reduction in government. Government will grow, they get to maintain spending at current levels and baseline, another damn newt glide paths to a balanced budget, called kicking the can down the road.
DEFUND ALL collectivist’s collectives. DEFUND ALL foreign collectives. DEFUND/DISMANTLE ALL NGOs. DEFUND/DISMANTLE ALL collectivist/totalitarian departments. The U.S.A. becomes financially solvent and we become very low-taxed prosperous/productive citizens in a country which acts as a beacon for individual liberty.
From Frederic Bastiat...
Men naturally rebel against the injustice of which they are victims. Thus, when plunder is organized by law for the profit of those who make the law, all the plundered classes try somehow to enter — by peaceful or revolutionary means — into the making of laws. According to their degree of enlightenment, these plundered classes may propose one of two entirely different purposes when they attempt to attain political power: Either they may wish to stop lawful plunder, or they may wish to share in it.
Woe to the nation when this latter purpose prevails among the mass victims of lawful plunder when they, in turn, seize the power to make laws! Until that happens, the few practice lawful plunder upon the many, a common practice where the right to participate in the making of law is limited to a few persons. But then, participation in the making of law becomes universal. And then, men seek to balance their conflicting interests by universal plunder. Instead of rooting out the injustices found in society, they make these injustices general. As soon as the plundered classes gain political power, they establish a system of reprisals against other classes. They do not abolish legal plunder. (This objective would demand more enlightenment than they possess.) Instead, they emulate their evil predecessors by participating in this legal plunder, even though it is against their own interests.
It is as if it were necessary, before a reign of justice appears, for everyone to suffer a cruel retribution — some for their evilness, and some for their lack of understanding.
It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.
It seems too vague to be taken seriously. Non-defense discretionary spending? What exactly is that? What exactly is going to be cut? This from the “pro-life” senator who told Repubs to give up the fight on defunding Planned Parenthood & that it was a waste of time.
I don’t consider cutting almost $400 million to fund Big Murder a waste of time.
This guy is full of it. This, to me, is nothing more than fluffy political speak & talking points.
Not buying it!
A good start but anyone who doesn’t talk tariffs I file under “economic illiterate”. Tariffs create American jobs. He has no specifics of how to create jobs that will pay taxes because Toomey is a creation of the libertarian “Club For Growth”. Yeah he is better than a Democrat.
I like his flattened taxes ideas to replace loopholes that only make tax lawyers & accountants rich. What kind of jobs will they be getting after losing their “tax” jobs? Hamburger flipper? Janitor?...no the illegals have those jobs sewn up. Gubbermint worker?
Not likely. Aside from the fact that he prefers unicorn skittles to RINO dung, I mean....
I smell RINO dung>>>>>
Libertarian RINO dung.
Without reading the article, here is what I came up with in .02 seconds:
Cut entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) and burdensome regulations.
Do I win?
I’d be careful referring to Toomey as a conservative....he’s taken the other side on several issues lately. I think he’s a wolf in sheeps’ clothes. A RINO, if you will. Granted, I voted for him because he was better than the alternative (Sestak) but I don’t have great expectations of tea party conservatism & fiscal responsibility.
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