Issue Position: The Economy and Debt

Issue Position

Congress has authorized over $2.5 trillion of spending to "stimulate" the economy. President Obama told the American people that if they spent this amount of money, that unemployment rates would level off and the economy would start growing again. Now here we are, a year later, and the jobless rate continues to grow; the unemployed represent over 10% of all workers[1]. This is tragic….more importantly it didn't need to happen.

In the 1930's, both President Herbert Hoover and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt used taxpayer dollars in attempts to stimulate the economy. The Great Depression lasted for almost a decade and what resulted was a system of patronage whereby if you voted for the party in power you were rewarded with money and if you didn't, well, you simply were left out. Today we see signs of that happening now. Congress passed a massive spending bill, called it "stimulus" and mortgaged our children's future to pay for it. But while Washington DC passed a trillion dollars of special interest spending, they did incredibly little to create jobs or get the economy moving again. If elected officials are going to spend these obscene amounts of money in the name of job creation, they should at least create jobs out of it. The vast majority of the stimulus funding will arrive in 2010 (coincidentally right before all these politicians are up for election again). We don't need jobs a year from now, we need jobs right now.

The U.S. government has over spent during last four decades and the current Congress has taken spending to new levels. Whenever you and I overspend, the money must be paid back. Debt can only take us so far and contrary to what we have been told by the government experts; we cannot borrow our way out of debt. This is true whether we look at it individually, in terms of business and industry, or in terms of government. The bill always comes due.

The U.S. government has borrowed $12 trillion and this level of debt cannot be sustained and must be paid down. So much money has been drained from the economy by excessive government spending that we have over burdened ourselves. Until the spending problem in Washington DC is corrected, the economy will struggle under the burden. Long term economic recovery requires government at all levels to spend less, pay off debt, and become more fiscally responsible.

Economies ebb and flow naturally. I believe that the economy is best able to grow when the government takes less out of it. Each dollar the government "redirects" is a dollar that would have naturally been used in the free market system to improve productivity, employ people and provide a service. Government's intrusion into the natural flow of the markets does little to make economies grow and in fact can get in the way and make matters worse.

So where do we go from here? We elect representatives that understand the principles of a restrained government discussed above and then we hold them accountable. We send people to Washington DC to not just talk about smaller, more responsible government; we send those with enough life experience to get the job done. Now is not the time for "on the job" training. We need representatives that know how jobs are created and budgets are balanced; not from reading books or spending time in committee meetings about it but from actually having done it. I have spent thirty years of my professional life doing these things and I will do them in Washington DC, too.
[1] Bureau of Labor Statistics, December 4, 2009 http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

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