By Senator Manchin
When I first came to Washington, I asked our nation's financial experts the first question you ask when you're trying to balance your books. How much revenue do we have?
They told me they planned to spend about $3.7 trillion that year. I asked again how much we brought in. They told me that it would be hard to spend less than that $3.7 trillion But they still wouldn't tell me how much revenue we had.
I told them that's not how we balanced our books in West Virginia, and finally they said that our government had about $2.2 trillion in revenue. Now, I'm not a math major, but you don't have to tell me that America's budget was short by about $1.5 trillion.
That doesn't make any sense to me, or the good people of our great state.
In fact, our debt has gotten so bad, and our spending so far out of whack, that the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who's at the highest levels of our military, says that the greatest threat to our national security is our debt. Not another nation, not another army, not the fear of another attack -- but our debt. We've hit the wall.
For the first time since World War II, our total national debt now exceeds the gross domestic product of this entire country.
Now, commonsense would tell you that your leaders would do something about it. But instead of voting on any kind of meaningful long-term fix -- or even a pathway to a fix -- the Congress is voting on whether or not to go into more debt. This week, we voted on whether to block President Obama's request to increase the debt ceiling by $1.2 trillion and allow the U.S. debt to reach $16.4 trillion. This increase will mark the second-highest debt limit increase in history and will continue to allow record debt.
But without any real fix or pathway to a fix, I could not in good conscience vote to raise this nation's debt ceiling to an unprecedented $16.4 trillion. We simply cannot allow this death spiral of debt to continue with no long-term plan to get spending under control and set this country on a strong financial path. We are currently over $15 trillion in debt, and we haven't had a balanced budget since 2001. Beginning in 2009, our deficit has exceeded $1 trillion annually. If nothing is done, our debt will hit $21 trillion by 2021. This means that without a fix, in 2021 our nation will spend more on the interest on our debt than we do on education, energy, and our defense -- combined.
Unfortunately, while I voted against raising the debt limit, the resolution of disapproval fell short of the 60 votes that would have been needed to block the increase, earning only 44 votes.
But what is even worse is that our leaders haven't done anything to solve the problem.
We all know that solving our debt crisis will not be easy, but this problem is not a Democratic or Republican problem, it's an American problem. Since both parties share blame for creating it, we must work together to fix it.
That is why it is incomprehensible to me that all of our leaders are ignoring one of the best frameworks we have: the bipartisan, commonsense Bowles-Simpson agreement that emerged from the President's fiscal commission. In fact, in his State of the Union Address this week, I was disappointed that President Obama addressed our debt crisis without once mentioning the recommendations of the bipartisan Bowles-Simpson agreement.
Whether we choose to follow the Bowles-Simpson framework or another idea, though, we must do what is right: eliminate wasteful spending, cut our deficits and achieve meaningful tax reform.
My vote against the debt ceiling increase is a message to the leaders in Congress and the President that they must act now. Doing nothing -- or, even worse, papering over our very real fiscal problems with temporary, Band-Aid solutions -- is no longer an option for the people of West Virginia and this great nation.
As your Senator, I will continue to work across party lines on commonsense solutions to our fiscal problems, because I believe that we should give the next generation a country and an economy that is in better shape than what we inherited. And I know you do, too.