TAXPAYERS?
Group Sends $1.8 Trillion in Spending Cuts to Super Committee
(Washington, D.C.) – Today, Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) issued a statement criticizing the deficit reduction plan revealed by President Obama in his speech at the White House Rose Garden. President Obama pledged to veto any plan that lowers the federal government’s deficit and debt without implementing new sources of revenue, or higher taxes. He offered Americans a choice between “crumbling roads and schools” and a plan to raise taxes on corporations and higher wage earners, but did not propose any substantive reforms to entitlements like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, which together make up 71 percent of mandatory federal spending.
“President Obama continues to perpetrate the myth that America’s staggering deficit and debt are a product of too little revenue,” said CAGW President Tom Schatz, “when even a cursory glance at the federal budget over the last four years reveals that runaway spending is the real culprit. Federal spending as a percentage of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) reached a post-war high in fiscal year (FY) 2009, and is likely to climb even higher if the President gets his way on new stimulus spending, and as taxpayers begin to feel the effects of his massive expansion of healthcare expenditures. The President’s failure to broach the subject of restructuring Social Security, despite longer life expectancies for seniors and dismal financial prospects for the program, is typical of his attempts to grab taxpayer dollars while avoiding difficult reforms.
“Today’s speech reflected a disappointing lack of imagination on the part of the President, who consistently looks to solve problems by throwing more money at them, despite a history of feeble results. It was another insight into President Obama’s attitude toward taxpayers, which treats their hard-earned income as a tool that can be manipulated into aiding an agenda of ever-expanding government. His fictional dilemma between lousy infrastructure and schools or higher taxes revealed a fundamental misunderstanding of recent spending patterns: transportation spending as a percentage of GDP has been increasing steadily since the early 1980s, and education spending has doubled since the 1970s, but unbridled waste and mismanagement have prevented taxpayers from seeing proportionate returns on their investments.
“Spending reductions in an era of sky-high budgets should not be treated as a bargaining chip – they should be the first step toward trimming the deficit and paying down the national debt,” added Schatz. Accordingly, CAGW has sent its Prime Cuts 2011 publication – a compendium of 691 recommendations that would save taxpayers $391.9 billion in the first year and $1.8 trillion over five years – to Congress’ Joint Select Committee, which is preparing a plan to reduce America’s deficit and national debt. Enacting each of the recommendation in Prime Cuts would go a long way toward restoring the federal government’s fiscal solvency and reducing each American’s share of the debt. It would also send the message that the government believes in protecting private wealth, rather than milking it dry,” Schatz concluded.
Citizens Against Government Waste is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating waste, fraud, mismanagement and abuse in government.
http://www.cagw.org/newsroom/releases/2011/cagw-to-pres-obama-are-you.html