The House and Senate are scheduled to vote on their respective budget resolutions this week. The Budget Committees of both chambers largely adopted President Obama’s record-shattering $3.6 trillion budget proposal in tact. That’s why I urgently need you to tell your elected officials to save this country and each and every one of us from financial ruin by voting NO on the budget.
As reported by the Washington Post, President Obama is right now marshalling his grassroots network of campaign supporters to ram through Congress with little debate the far-reaching changes to our nation’s healthcare, energy, and education systems contained in his budget.
We must counter their efforts before they bankrupt this country and set America on a path to becoming a social welfare state. That’s why your Senators and Representative urgently need to hear from you today!
President Obama’s budget would raise income taxes on individuals and small businesses by $636 billion over 10 years. It creates a $634 billion “reserve fund” for nationalizing healthcare that would be paid for with a combination of tax increases and cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. His budget would also impose a “light bulb tax” on all Americans by implementing a cap-and-trade energy policy, where companies would have to pay the federal government to use oil, natural gas, and other fossil fuels. That tax alone could cost American families as much as $3,100 per year in higher prices for electricity, gasoline, and other products and services.
Not only would these tax increases further drain American families and businesses of income during the recession, they will stifle economic growth, just when our elected leaders should be enacting policies to promote it!
This massive $3.6 trillion budget proposal comes on top of the $787 billion “economic stimulus” package; $410 billion fiscal 2009 omnibus spending bill that was loaded with more than 8,000 earmarks; and the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street, Detroit automakers, and homeowners who took out mortgages they can’t afford.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has predicted that the Obama budget will push the federal deficit to a mind-numbing $1.85 trillion this year and pile up $9.3 trillion in deficits over the next decade, on top of the existing $11 trillion national debt! CBO called these deficits, which would never fall below 4 percent of our economy’s gross domestic product, “unsustainable.”
Friend, please tell your U.S. Senators and Representative today to reject the Senate and House budget resolutions.
Related Reading:
The Pig Book: How Government Wastes Your MoneyThe federal government wastes your tax dollars worse than a drunken sailor on shore leave. The 1984 Grace Commission uncovered that the Department of Defense spent $640 for a toilet seat and $436 for a hammer. Twenty years later things weren't much better. In 2004, Congress spent a record-breaking $22.9 billion dollars of your money on 10,656 of their pork-barrel projects. The war on terror has a lot to do with the record $413 billion in deficit spending, but it's also the result of pork over the last 18 years the likes of:- $50 million for an indoor rain forest in Iowa
- $102 million to study screwworms which were long ago eradicated from American soil
- $273,000 to combat goth culture in Missouri
- $2.2 million to renovate the North Pole (Lucky for Santa!)
- $50,000 for a tattoo removal program in California
- $1 million for ornamental fish research
Funny in some instances and jaw-droppingly stupid and wasteful in others, The Pig Book proves one thing about Capitol Hill: pork is king!
The Congressional Budget Office: Honest Numbers, Power, and Policymaking (American Governance and Public Policy series)Created in 1974, the U.S. Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has become one of the most influential forces in national policymaking. A critical component of our system of checks and balances, the CBO has given Congress the analytical capacity to challenge the president on budget issues while it protects the public interest, providing honest numbers about Congress's own budget proposals. The book discusses the CBO's role in larger budget policy and the more narrow "scoring" of individual legislation, such as its role in the 2009--2010 Obama health care reform. It also describes how the first director, Alice Rivlin, and seven successors managed to create and sustain a nonpartisan, highly credible agency in the middle of one of the most partisan institutions imaginable.
The Congressional Budget Office: Honest Numbers, Power, and Policy draws on interviews with high-level participants in the budget debates of the last 35 years to tell the story of the CBO. A combination of political history, economic history, and organizational development, The Congressional Budget Office offers an important, first book-length history of this influential agency.
