Issue Position: National Debt

Issue Position

Today, our nation faces a crisis. We are in our third consecutive year of trillion-dollar deficits, and President Obama has proposed a budget that would guarantee us a fourth. For too long, politicians have made the easy choice and refused to do anything about our overspending. In an effort to make all interest groups happy, they blindly increase spending for all functions of federal spending without regard to whether the taxpayers' money is being spent effectively, or whether the activity is critical enough to require federal funding at a time of trillion-dollar deficits.

But it does not have to be this way. While in the Senate, I put forward a plan that would balance the budget by 2013 and cut the debt in half by 2021. My plan did this by freezing all federal spending at fiscal year 2007 levels ($2.729 trillion). If we did that, we could extend all of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, index the Alternative Minimum Tax for inflation, and we would actually begin to pay down the national debt.

Of course, this approach would require cuts to discretionary spending, and reforms of mandatory spending programs. While those at or near retirement should be guaranteed their benefits for life, the programs are going to need reform so that they are still solvent to serve younger generations decades from now. These cuts may be difficult to make, but we have to have the courage to do it in order to save future generations. Imagine what we could do if we worked over the next decade to produce savings.

At the end of the day, this is not about us. This is about our kids. Current generations have spent this nation to the brink of bankruptcy, and now we have a duty to make things right so that our kids are not the first generation of Americans to be worse off than their parents.

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