Will our Government shut down at midnight tomorrow?

I received my weekly “Situation Report” from Richard Nugent, my local Congressman, and would like to share it with you. In my opinion, Congressman Nugent has his head screwed on straight and has a good prospective of our current problems.

Quote from Congressman Richard Nugent’s

Situation Report received today:

Dear Friends,

This is going to be a long one folks, but needless to say, there is quite a bit going on in Washington this week:  Is the government going to shutdown?  Will the Democrats agree to make some serious cuts?  What’s going to happen with the budget?  I wish I had the answers.  All I can tell you is that 47 days ago, Republicans passed a spending bill for the remainder of the year.  In those 47 days, the President and the Democrat majority in the Senate have not passed or put forward a counter-proposal. 

The President, for his part, left town, started a war in Libya, filled out a March Madness bracket, left town again, and in the last few days, started complaining that Republicans hadn’t passed a budget.  I might have thought that he missed the House passing its bill because he was jet-setting around, but then I remembered he immediately threatened to veto our bill without offering a proposal of his own.  Then, a couple days ago, he said we “need to act like grownups.”  I don’t know about you, but I take exception to that.

That’s the thing about President Obama.  He has a whole swarm of advisers who read polls and tell him that the American people are getting frustrated because he is not being a leader.  This isn’t new.  Several months ago, when that swarm was telling him he needed to do something about the budget, he decided to put together a deficit commission.  That is classic Washington-speak for doing something when you’re really doing nothing.

In any event, after much fanfare and a couple dozen press conferences, the Deficit Commission got to work.  When they released their proposal recommending dramatic cuts to spending, the President quietly avoided them and then released a budget completely ignoring their recommendations. I guess he hoped nobody would notice.   We did.

Earlier this week, after much hard work and thoughtful deliberations, Paul Ryan, the Republican Chairman of the House Budget Committee released a budget proposal for 2012.  The co-chairs of the President’s own Deficit Commission immediately released a statement calling it “a serious, honest, straightforward approach to addressing our nation’s enormous fiscal challenges” (they didn’t exactly say that about the President’s budget).

While there are certainly things in the Ryan budget proposal that I would have done differently, he lived up to my two key principles.  First, the budget would not affect seniors’ benefits for anybody 55 and up.  I testified before his committee last week and drew a line in the sand about that.  Second, the budget presents a credible strategy for reducing deficits, balancing the budget, and getting the government out of the way of small businesses. 

Ryan’s proposal spends $6.2 trillion less over the next ten years than the President’s proposal and by doing so, America will achieve primary balance in the budget by 2015.  In short, that means that revenues will cover all expenditures (excluding interest payments) within in four years… Keep in mind that our deficit this year is 42% of the whole budget.  That is what I call credible a credible plan. 

Like you, I’d like to see us get to a balanced budget quicker (who wouldn’t?), but as Ryan said to me directly, “Rich, if there were any way on earth to get it done, you know I would.”  He’s a good man and I know he means it.

As always, please feel free to forward this along.  It’s obviously a critical time in Washington and I’d really like to get as much input as possible.

Sincerely,

Rich Nugent

Member of Congress

If you have time, click on the link below to read the proposed 2012 budget posted by Paul Ryan, Chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on the Budget.

http://budget.house.gov/fy2012budget/