Fine print belies promises
December  18, 2013
By Congressman Raul Labrador

Last week, I voted against a budget plan to raise taxes and increase government spending by $63 billion over the next two years.

The budget plan – which passed the House and is awaiting action in the Senate – was sold to the American people as cutting the deficit by $23 billion over the next 10 years. But if you look at the fine print, what it does is make promises of future spending cuts in exchange for actual spending increases today.

Those spending increases gut the hard-won spending cuts Republicans fought for during the debt ceiling battle of 2011, otherwise known as the “sequester.” The “sequester” – which ended up generating bipartisan support, and was signed into law by President Obama – forced necessary and long-overdue cuts in discretionary spending.

And while it wasn’t perfect, it was a big step forward in the fight to get our $17 trillion debt under control.

The “sequester,” however, was never going to be the final answer. After all, the biggest drivers of our debt aren’t discretionary programs, but entitlement programs, like Medicare and Social Security.

That’s why Republicans made a promise to the American people that we would use the sequester to fight for real entitlement reform.

Last week, I advocated for keeping that promise. I told my colleagues – both Republican and Democrat – that we had a historic opportunity to find common ground in order to save Medicare and Social Security.

But they decided to go in a different direction. They decided to kick the can down the road while making empty promises to the American people.

To me, that didn’t make any sense.

I continue to believe that cutting spending and reducing the debt are vital components to bolstering our economy and preserving the American Dream. Since Republicans took control of the House in 2011 – and made fiscal responsibility one of our top priorities – government spending has shrunk by the largest amount in decades and the deficit has been cut in half.

Meanwhile, the economy has grown at a faster rate and the unemployment rate has fallen. This is in sharp contrast to the doomsayers who claimed that cutting spending would weaken our economy. In truth, the opposite has happened.

The deal that passed the House this week was a bad one, plain and simple.

We could have done better, and we should have done better. But the fight for fiscal sanity will continue. And I pledge to keep being a leader in that fight.