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Paul Ryan: Here’s How We Can End This Stalemate

The Wall Street Journal
October 10, 2013

Both Reagan and Clinton negotiated debt-ceiling deals with their opponents. We’re ready to negotiate.

The president is giving Congress the silent treatment. He’s refusing to talk, even though the federal government is about to hit the debt ceiling. That’s a shame—because this doesn’t have to be another crisis. It could be a breakthrough. We have an opportunity here to pay down the national debt and jump-start the economy, if we start talking, and talking specifics, now. To break the deadlock, both sides should agree to common-sense reforms of the country’s entitlement programs and tax code.

First, let’s clear something up. The president says he “will not negotiate” on the debt ceiling. He claims that such negotiations would be unprecedented. But many presidents have negotiated on the debt ceiling—including him. In 1985, Ronald Reagan signed a debt-ceiling deal with congressional Democrats that set deficit caps. In 1997, Bill Clinton hammered out an agreement with congressional Republicans to raise the debt ceiling, reform Medicare and cut capital-gains taxes. Two years ago, Mr. Obama signed the Budget Control Act, which swapped spending cuts for a debt-ceiling hike.

So the president has negotiated before, and he can do so now. In 2011, Oregon’s Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden and I offered ideas to reform Medicare. We had different perspectives, but we also had mutual trust. Neither of us had to betray his principles; all we had to do was put prudence ahead of pride.

If Mr. Obama decides to talk, he’ll find that we actually agree on some things. For example, most of us agree that gradual, structural reforms are better than sudden, arbitrary cuts. For my Democratic colleagues, the discretionary spending levels in the Budget Control Act are a major concern. And the truth is, there’s a better way to cut spending. We could provide relief from the discretionary spending levels in the Budget Control Act in exchange for structural reforms to entitlement programs.

Read more here.

Ending Spending Signs Joint Letter in Support of ‘No Washington Excemption Act’

Ending Spending recently signed a joint letter in support of S.1497, Senator David Vitter’s “The No Washington Exemption Act” legislation that would make Congress subject to Obamacare just like millions of Americans. You can read the letter here.

Ending Spending Praises House For Delaying of Obamacare

Congress Must Remove its Own Exemption from Obamacare

WASHINGTON, D.C.— Ending Spending today announced its support for the bill the House of Representatives passed to fund the U.S. government and delays the individual mandate of Obamacare.

“We are pleased the House of Representatives followed this course of action, which we have long supported,” said Brian Baker, President and General Counsel of Ending Spending Action Fund. “Our polling data has shown that the American people favor this and the House is clearly more attuned to the will of the people than the Senate. We call on the Senate Democrats and the President to endorse this bill. If they do not, the blame for a government shutdown will be theirs alone. The Vitter Amendment, which would eliminate Congress’ exemption from Obamacare, is essential to making the bill stronger.

“The President has flatly said he will not negotiate. Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) has resorted to name calling instead of offering any compromise. According to our polling data , the American people want both sides to work this out but it won’t happen if some in the process refuse to discuss options. Refusal to listen to the people, while exempting itself from Obamacare shows everything that is wrong with Washington.

“While this is a positive development, both houses of Congress must end the exemption for Members of Congress and their staffs. The delay is only fair if it applies to everyone equally. This flawed plan is causing companies to eliminate benefits or cut employee hours. If the American people have to live with the effects of this law, so should Congress,” said Mr. Baker.

Republican Leaders and Americans Look to Reforms on the Debt Ceiling

Republican leaders are slowly convincing the GOP conference to move toward a continuing resolution that would keep the government funded and the Capitol’s lights on before the Monday deadline, but leadership’s best shot may be to pivot toward the debt ceiling.

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, met with his rank and file members Thursday to announce a plan to punt a list of demands including a one-year delay of the Affordable Care Act and tax reform to the debt ceiling.

While Americans were weary of a government shutdown that could result if the Senate, House and White House cannot come to an agreement on the continuing resolution, a host of polls out Thursday show that Americans want Congress and the president to play ball on the debt ceiling.

An Ending Spending and American Action Forum poll showed that 65 percent of Americans were opposed to raising the debt ceiling without reforming the country’s spending practices.

“Speaker John Boehner and the House Republicans have the opportunity, in the wake of the Obamacare debate, to demand some serious cuts in the budget before any discussions of a debt limit increase,” said Brian Baker, the president of Ending Spending.

The center-right group’s poll also showed 54 percent of Americans would support raising the debt ceiling if the White House agreed to delay the full implementation of Obamacare for one year. And 73 percent of Americans want to see the president approve the Keystone XL pipeline as part of the debt ceiling debate.

New Poll: Time To Negotiate On Debt Ceiling

New Survey Shows Majority of Americans Believe Chief Executive Not Listening to the American People, Lacks Negotiation Skills to Govern the Country

Today, Ending Spending and American Action Forum released a new poll that found a strong majority of voters want President Obama to negotiate with Members of Congress over the debt limit.

Read the key findings memo here.

“The American people are understandably frustrated with Washington, but more so they are disappointed in President Obama’s inability to govern or even debate key issues of legislation,” said Brian Baker, President of Ending Spending.

In a survey conducted by TargetPoint Consulting, a majority of Americans (52%) called on the President to negotiate with Congress and are intensely opposed to the President raising the debt ceiling “cleanly” without spending reforms. A hefty majority - 65% - nearly two thirds of registered voters – oppose increasing the debt ceiling in this manner.

“Speaker John Boehner and the House Republicans have the opportunity, in the wake of the Obamacare debate, to demand some serious cuts in the budget before any discussions of a debt limit increase,” said Baker. “The President may get his way on Obamacare, with the help allies in media and in Congress, but the American people are looking for meaningful tradeoffs in exchange for raising the debt ceiling and want President Obama to negotiate with Congress in order to find a path forward on the national debt.”

Some of the tradeoffs a majority of Americans would approve in exchange for raising the debt ceiling include: (1) delaying the implementation of Obamacare by at least one year (54%); (2) easing America’s dependence upon Mideast oil by enacting a pro-growth energy policy (including building the Keystone Oil Pipeline) (73%); (3) eliminating certain tax breaks for people and businesses as part of tax code reform (57%), and (4) reforming certain entitlement and other support programs.

“Spending reforms and policy tradeoffs are essential in a debt limit bill otherwise we simply kick the can down the road by buying time before the debt limit is approached again,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin, President of the American Action Forum. “While the president has been missing in action from the policy debates on funding the government and raising the debt limit, the important question is whether the president will step up to the plate and negotiate in a meaningful way to provide a long-term solution.”

The national survey was conducted with 800 registered voters September 13-18, 2013 on attitudes towards the upcoming legislative debates over the continuing resolution and the debt ceiling. The margin of error for the survey is +/- 3.5%. The survey was conducted on behalf of Ending Spending (www.EndingSpending.com) and American Action Forum (www.AmericanActionForum.org).

Read the key findings memo here.



What Happens During a Government “Shutdown”?

By Hans A. von Spakovsky
Heritage.org

If President Barack Obama “shuts down” the government by vetoing a continuing resolution (CR) that funds all government operations with the exception of Obamacare, or the Senate fails to pass such a CR, crucial services will continue without interruption. That includes all services essential for national security and public safety—such as the military and law enforcement—as well as mandatory government payments such as Social Security and veterans’ benefits.

The key fact, as the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) itself has said, is that when there is a short-term lapse in appropriations, “the federal Government will not be truly ‘shut down’…because Congress has itself provided that some activities of Government should continue.” In fact, any claims that not passing a CR will result in a “shutting down” of the government “is an entirely inaccurate description” according to the DOJ.[1]

Such a lapse in funding would be neither catastrophic nor unprecedented, but it would pare down government services to those most essential for “the safety of human life or the protection of property.” That would not include the hundreds of billions of dollars in the federal budget that are constantly squandered and wasted on frivolous, unnecessary, and unneeded programs.

Read more here.

Surprise CBO Report: United States on an “Unsustainable” Budget Course

By Erika Johnsen
HotAir.com

Here’s some oh-so-pleasant news to keep in mind as Democrats casually insist that we should simply raise the debt ceiling again and again and again, with no end in sight, and fiercely rip Republicans for even daring to suggest budget cuts to federal programs.

Congressional budget analysts on Tuesday issued a new warning about the long-term U.S. budget outlook, just as lawmakers and the White House are staring at a pair of fiscal confrontations.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said that the U.S. national debt is now 73% of gross domestic product, the highest in history except for a period around World War II. The figure is twice the percentage it was at the end of 2007. Read the CBO report.

Modestly lower spending, an improving economy and increased collection of income, payroll and corporate taxes have helped narrow the government’s deficit this fiscal year. If current laws remain in place, CBO said, the debt will decline “slightly” relative to GDP over the next several years.

But CBO cautioned that long-term challenges remain. It warned that growing future deficits will push the debt to 100% of GDP 25 years from now. And under another scenario that envisions changes being made to some laws — including removing the so-called automatic budget cuts known as the sequester — the debt would be even higher, at nearly 190%, by 2038.

Read more here.

Obama’s Affordable Care Act Looking a Bit Unaffordable

The National Journal

Republicans have long blamed President Obama’s signature health care initiative for increasing insurance costs, dubbing it the “Unaffordable Care Act.”

Turns out, they might be right.

For the vast majority of Americans, premium prices will be higher in the individual exchange than what they’re currently paying for employer-sponsored benefits, according to a National Journal analysis of new coverage and cost data. Adding even more out-of-pocket expenses to consumers’ monthly insurance bills is a swell in deductibles under the Affordable Care Act.

Health law proponents have excused the rate hikes by saying the prices in the exchange won’t apply to the millions receiving coverage from their employers. But that’s only if employers continue to offer that coverage-something that’s looking increasingly uncertain. Already, UPS, for example, cited Obamacare as its reason for nixing spousal coverage. And while a Kaiser Family Foundation report found that 49 percent of the U.S. population now receives employer-sponsored coverage, more companies are debating whether they will continue to be in the business of providing such benefits at all.

Economists largely agree there won’t be a sea change among employers offering coverage. But they’re also saying small businesses are still in play.

Caroline Pearson, vice president at Avalere Health, a health care and public policy advisory firm, said there’s a calculation low-wage companies will make to determine if there’s cost savings in sending employees to the exchanges.

“The amount you have to gross up their wages so they can get their own insurance and the cost of the penalties may add up to less than the cost of providing care,” she said.

Read more here

U.S. Faces New Debt-Limit Deadline

The Washington Post

The U.S. government is set to run out of borrowing authority in mid-October, leaving the government at a high risk of not having enough cash to fund all operations, including paying Social Security checks and military salaries, officials said on Monday.

The mid-October date creates a new cliffhanger for Washington, one that’s on the early side of what many analysts had anticipated.

In exchange for raising the $16.7 trillion debt limit, Republicans are demanding significant new spending cuts — and some are insisting on defunding or delaying President Obama’s signature health care law. Obama says he will not negotiate over the debt limit.

The Treasury Department could not say exactly when Congress would have to raise the debt limit or risk a federal default. In a letter to House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), however, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew warned that the government would only have $50 billion in cash in mid-october, which may be “insufficient to cover net expenditures for an extended period of time.”

Lew said that if investors begin to doubt the U.S. government’s ability to pay back loans, “the United States could face an immediate cash shortfall. Indeed, such a scenario could undermine financial markets and result in significant disruptions to our economy.”

Read more here.

After Six Budget Showdowns, Big Government is Mostly Unchanged

The Washington Post

After 21 / 2 years of budget battles, this is what the federal government looks like now:

It is on pace, this year, to spend $3.455 trillion.

That figure is down from 2010 — the year that worries about government spending helped bring on a tea party uprising, a Republican takeover in the House and then a series of ulcer-causing showdowns in Congress.

But it is not down by that much. Back then, the government spent a whopping $3.457 trillion.

Measured another way — not in dollars, but in people — the government has about 4.1 million employees today, military and civilian. That’s more than the populations of 24 states.

Back in 2010, it had 4.3 million employees. More than the populations of 24 states.

Today, another budget fight looms. If Republicans and Democrats can’t agree on spending levels by Oct. 1, there could be a government shutdown. Followed, perhaps, by a national credit default.

That will be showdown number seven. To assess what the first six accomplished, The Washington Post tried to measure the government in four different dimensions: federal expenditures, federal workers, federal rules and federal real estate.

The first two were down, slightly. The third was way up. And in the fourth case, the government itself wasn’t sure what happened.

In every category there was evidence that — even as politicians made some headway in reducing the budget — they could not shake many of the old habits that made government big in the first place. They allowed duplication to live. They let “temporary” giveaways turn permanent. And they yielded to inertia, declining to revisit expensive old decisions.

The result was that Congress often passed up “smart cuts” in favor of dumb ones — taking broad hacks at the budget, instead of pruning away what was unnecessary.

“For all the brave talk, one single fact has trumped all this great rhetoric. Most of the people who came in saying, ‘We’re going to change Washington,’ simply didn’t understand Washington,” said Steve Bell, a longtime Republican staffer who now works at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Bell’s point is that today’s politicians do not understand the political forces that produce and then protect inefficient programs. Or the difficulty of changing the social-benefit programs — such as Medicare and Social Security — that spend the bulk of Washington’s money.

“That kind of hard-edged budget work . . . is just too complicated. And just too politically incendiary, for this town to do,” Bell said. “That’s why this town hasn’t done it.”

Read more here.

Taxpayers Connected:

Our national debt is  
$ 00 00 , 000 000 , 000 000 , 000 000 , 000 000
and each American Taxpayer owes $119,236 of it.