Pay Attention

My first thought was to entitle this post, Ships Passing In The Night. That didn’t work out, for technical reasons.

The appropriate picture to accompany the post would have appeared to be a black rectangle. It might have been mistaken for the picture of a black cat in an abandoned mine. Or, possibly, a picture from the dark side of the Moon. It could even have been considered to be a picture of a Blue Dog Democrat’s heart.

If you recall from my last post, It’s Time, I had tried for over two weeks to get a response from my congressman, a Blue Dog Democrat. My requests were for his specific differences with Obama on healthcare reform a for us to debate the subject during his August recess.

Well, I finally received a letter from him. I will share it with you in full. It is boilerplate but I think you will see that he, or his staffer, didn’t really pay attention to my requests, or chose to ignore them. Enjoy.

Dated July 27, 2009 – Received August 1, 2009

Dear Crawford,

Knowing your support for a sound fiscal policy, I want to share with you important action the House of Representatives took this week to put us on the path to a balanced budget.

In 1990, I worked with a group of bipartisan Members to enact statutory Pay-As-You-Go (PayGo) legislation mandating fiscal responsibility by requiring any new spending by Congress be offset with a reduction of existing spending. (He fails to mention at least $58 trillion in off-budget debt that was not covered by the bill. Other methods of evasion are plentiful.) The result was an overwhelming success. Over the next decade, the deficit was slashed, the budget was balanced and surpluses were recorded for the first time since 1969. (The 1969 budget was balanced by omitting most of the cost of the Vietnam War.) Despite my objections, (he’s ineffective?) PayGo was allowed to expire in 2002 and our fiscal record since then has been a complete failure. Those surpluses became record deficits overnight. Since 2002, we have been borrowing from China and other countries to pay for federal programs.

The path that began in 2002 is an unsustainable one. This week the House passed H.R. 2920, the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2009. This legislation reinstates the PayGo rules that proved so successful in the late 1990s and can lead us back to sound footing.

PayGo is no silver bullet. It requires that Congress make tough choices and weigh the value of any new program against the successes and failures of old ones. Adhering to PayGo’s restrictions requires strong leadership and a recognition that these choices won’t always be popular, but they are necessary. As you can see in the chart, in the last two decades, when we lived with PayGo we prospered. Without it we have become debtors. I hope the Senate will soon follow the House’s lead and pass this vital legislation.

I want you to know my primary focus has been and remains putting our country’s finances in order. (Helluva job, Brown . . . er, Bartie.) Families have to live within a budget and government should too. (The largest group of families in bankruptcy court couldn’t live within a budget because of medical bills.) Our economy is improving daily – not as fast as many of us would like to see, but progress is there. Banks are lending again, (?) the housing market is slowly stabilizing and businesses are restocking their inventory. (?) In the coming weeks I will support amendments to require a balanced budget, tax cuts for small businesses (Mustn’t forget those tax cuts) that spur recovery and efforts to close loopholes that have allowed American companies to stash profits overseas without paying their fair share of taxes. The recovery will not be complete for some time, the process of getting there will not be easy and we owe it to those who have suffered during the recession to ensure the safeguards are in place to prevent history from repeating itself. (Always finish with well-worn platitudes.)

Sincerely,

Bart Gordon

Perhaps I just missed his references to healthcare reform and a debate. If you see them anywhere in there, I would appreciate you pointing them out to me.

Tagged as: bart gordon, blue dog, congress, debate, debt, dino, health care, healthcare, insurance, paygo, reform, tax