The federal budget deficit is on track to hit $1.1 trillion by the year 2025 and President Obama’s proposed budget does nothing to begin tackling this mounting problem.
Instead of real reform to entitlement spending — about two-thirds of the budget — everything for the past few years has focused on small budgetary cuts in discretionary spending or, as in the case of this year, new taxes to pay for Obama’s new programs.
And to top off the lack of real reform, Obama is actually being praised for having the lowest deficit of his presidency — the still shocking $468 billion — without any regard for the rest of the estimate that predicts it will skyrocket over the next decade.
If Congress and the president do nothing to stem the tide, it will fall on the backs of millennials to pay it off.
Red Alert Politics asked a couple of House Republicans Tuesday when Washington planned to start taking this benefits crisis seriously.
“Your generation should be real concerned about that. And that’s why people need to get involved in politics, not as a Republican or Democrat, but as an American to say, ‘What’s best for America? What’s best for the future of my kids?'” Rep Ted Yoho (R- Fla.) said.
“He [Obama] has the fortune of good timing. In 2012, new taxes went into play because of Obamacare that out $1.7 trillion of new taxes that did bring down the deficit. But it’s a temporary decline and you’re going to start seeing it go back up and it’s because of the increased spending. Where we need to be spending the money in America is on research and development to increase our competitiveness, tax reform to increase jobs and we need to reform our education system.”
Rep. Rob Woodall (R- Ga.) said that House Republicans have been “serious” about this kind of reform for years now, but without support from Obama, it has not been able to get done. Now is the time to act to “free the next generation” from those debts, Woodall said.
“The Paul Ryan budget is something we have already passed, not once since I’ve been in Congress, but four separate times. It takes those steps to protect Medicare for future generations, to make sure that folks aren’t worried about whether or not those benefits will be there. I’m told that recent polling suggests that young people believe they are more likely to see a U.F.O. in their lifetime than to see a Social Security check in their lifetime. That’s awful because Social Security taxes are the largest taxes that 80 percent of Americans pay,” he said.
“We need to restore that confidence in the American people that their dollars are being spent effectively and efficiently. Our budget will do that. We’ve got to have a partnership with the president, however, and that partnership was supposed to come from the Budget Control Act. But we have not found a partner in the president and looking at this budget, it does not appear that he is interested in working with us on those issues going forward.”
