With the national
debt now topping $14 trillion, up from $13 trillion just seven
months ago, and a Gallup poll
revealing the outgoing Democratic Congress to have among the
lowest average approval ratings recorded in the last two decades,
it is a great relief to hear that incoming House Republicans are
planning to cut funding of their legislative offices by 5
percent. They are also cutting the House Appropriations Committee
budget by 9 percent. Both actions are part of new House Speaker
John A. Boehner’s commitment to reduce $35 million from Congress’s
very own administrative budget.
All this comes in addition to the GOP’s ban on federal
earmarks and an overall reduction in the number of House
appropriators from 60 committee members to 50. A good start, as
they say.
But there is more. The House Republicans are going to
enact new rules “to make it harder to tax and spend,”
writes the Wall Street Journal editorial
page. The GOP will, among other things, replace the Democrats’
often ignored “paygo” approach with a “cut as you go” requirement
in which increases in mandatory spending — for new and existing
entitlements — must be matched by spending cuts in an equal or
greater amount elsewhere in the budget.
Another encouraging aspect of the new rules package is the
empowerment of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the new Budget Committee
Chairman, the point on budget reform, to impose budget limits, on
his own, for the current fiscal year.
Speaker Pelosi and her colleagues did not pass a budget
resolution last year, thereby failing to give House Appropriators
any spending targets. Thus, Chairman Ryan’s authority is only
temporary, ending once a new budget resolution is finally passed by
the new Congress.
Ryan
notes that this authority was previously granted to the Budget
Chairman in the late 1990s.
While conceding that the current “deep fiscal hole is the
result of bipartisan failure over the years,” Ryan observes that
the last two consecutive years have seen trillion dollar deficits
with the Democrats not even proposing a budget for the current
fiscal year — “the first time this has happened since 1974, when
the modern congressional budget process was
established.”
It should be recalled that Paul Ryan is the only
legislator in either the House or Senate who has proposed a
comprehensive package to reform entitlements, taxes and health care
simultaneously.
Ryan
says “we will clean up the fiscal wreckage left by the House
Democrats, setting spending limits for the remainder of FY 2011 at
pre-stimulus, pre-bailout levels for non-security discretionary
spending.” That is to say he intends to return spending to 2008
levels which is considerably more ambitious than simply making “a
good start.”
A House GOP aide has commented to me that “the Federal
government is operating with no budget, no priorities, and no
restraints.”
“House Republicans intend to follow through on their
pledge to restore limits to the explosive growth of government, and
advance a fiscally responsible, pro-growth reform agenda,” says
this aide. May it ever be so.
My Democratic friends bombard me with graphs and article
showing how fiscally irresponsible the GOP was on spending,
expansion of entitlements, and an over-indulgence in deficit
spending during the years in which it controlled both Congress and
the White House. They will get no argument from me.
I can only pray that, under the leadership of Speaker
Boehner (who, I might add, never sought an earmark during all his
years in Congress) and Chairman Ryan, the Republican caucus will
undergo a sustained reformation bringing with it fiscal integrity
and spending restraint, nay, reductions.
So far, it looks promising. Happy New Year!
