Northwest Indiana Discussion

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) this week proposed a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution that would make the president’s failure to enforce that amendment an impeachable offense.

His Protecting America’s Solvency Act, H.R. 371, would let the debt ceiling rise by $1 trillion after congressional passage of the balanced-budget amendment. The ceiling could rise another $1 trillion after states ratify it.

The bill says the amendment must require federal spending not to exceed the revenue it collects, a goal it must meet after five years. But it does allow Congress to suspend this limit with a four-fifths majority vote, or by a simple majority during wartime.

If a budget deficit occurred for any other reason, the president would have to take “such steps as are necessary” to avoid it. Failure would leave him open to impeachment.

“The President may not order any increase in taxes or other revenue measures to enforce the Amendment,” the bill reads. “A President’s failure to prevent a prohibited fiscal year deficit is an impeachable offense.”

The nation’s long-term fiscal outlook hasn’t significantly improved following the recent agreement between Congress and the White House over tax and spending issues, according to a new analysis.

The “fiscal cliff” deal combined with the debt-limit agreement of August 2011 only slightly delays the United States reaching debt-to-gross domestic product levels that would damage the economy and risk another fiscal crisis, according to the a report from the Peter G. Peterson Foundation released on Tuesday.

The agreement “may have prevented the immediate threats that the fiscal cliff posed to our fragile economic recovery, but we haven’t remotely fixed the nation’s debt problem,” said Michael A. Peterson, president and COO of the Peterson Foundation.

“The primary goal of any sustainable fiscal policy is to stabilize the debt as a share of the economy and put it on a downward path, and yet our nation is still heading toward debt levels of 200 percent of GDP and beyond,” he said.

The report concludes that the recent round of deficit-reduction measures won’t make major improvements because it fails to address most of the major contributors to the debt and deficit, including rapidly rising healthcare costs.

The analysis suggests that lawmakers take action quickly to ensure that the nation is on a sustainable fiscal path.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Thursday said the American economy is “in a recovery” despite the decline in the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP).

Reid made the remark after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) blamed the White House for the unexpected contraction in the economy.

“[McConnell] continues bad mouthing the recovery,” Reid said on the Senate floor. “We are in a recovery.”

On Wednesday, the Commerce Department announced that the nation’s economy unexpectedly shrank by 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012. Echoing the White House, Reid blamed the GOP’s “austerity and brinkmanship” for the plunge.

“Growth went down in the fourth quarter because of reduced government spending,” Reid said. “The economy was rejecting the austerity and brinkmanship.”

WASHINGTON — White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Monday that he had no updates on when President Barack Obama will release his budget for the next fiscal year.

“I don’t have an update on the President’s budget,” Carney told reporters aboard Air Force One as the president travels to Minneapolis to discuss his gun control proposals when asked when Obama will submit his spending plan to Congress. The deadline for submitting his budget for fiscal year 2014 is Monday, February 4, 2013 under the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921.

Republicans have blasted Obama for missing the deadline — his third consecutive miss and the most of any president since the act was passed, according to data from the House Budget Committee.

“I’m disappointed the President has missed his deadline. But I’m not surprised,” he [Paul Ryan] said in a statement. “In four of the last five years, he’s failed to submit his budget on time. We still don’t know when we’ll receive the president’s request. And for nearly four years, Senate Democrats haven’t passed a budget at all. We deserve better.”

President Obama warned in his weekly address that the sequester would deal a “huge blow to middle-class families and our economy as a whole” and urged Congress to strike a compromise deal to avert the $85 billion in automatic cuts.

“There’s certainly no reason that middle-class families and small businesses should suffer just because Washington couldn’t come together and eliminate a few special-interest tax loopholes, or government programs that just don’t work,” Obama said. “At a time when economists and business leaders from across the spectrum have said that our economy is poised for progress, we shouldn’t allow self-inflicted wounds to put that progress in jeopardy.”

The president devoted a significant amount of his address to outlining the real-world consequences that would result if the sequester was implemented. On Friday, top administrative aides warned the cuts would hamper law enforcement, hurt federal education programs, withhold mental health services and furlough thousands of workers.

“If the sequester is allowed to go forward, thousands of Americans who work in fields like national security, education or clean energy are likely to be laid off,” Obama said. “Firefighters and food inspectors could also find themselves out of work – leaving our communities vulnerable. Programs like Head Start would be cut, and lifesaving research into diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s could be scaled back.

Rep. Martha Raby gives Weekly Republican Party Remarks

Hello, I’m Martha Roby. It is my honor to represent Alabama’s Second Congressional District.

As you may know, a series of deep, across-the-board military spending cuts known as ‘the sequester’ will go into effect in less than two weeks. In his State of the Union address, President Obama himself admitted that these cuts were a ‘really bad idea.’

What the President failed to mention was that the sequester was his idea, proposed by his administration during the debt limit negotiations in 2011. And now we in the House, on behalf of our constituents, are calling on the president to join us in replacing his sequester with better, more responsible spending cuts.

Just this week, top military commanders testified on Capitol Hill and confirmed what I had feared from the beginning about how the president’s sequester will hurt military installations in Alabama and around the country.

My district is home to Fort Rucker, the primary flight training base for Army Aviation. If the president’s sequester takes effect, Fort Rucker would lose 500 students training to be combat aviators and roughly 37,000 hours of aviation training. These numbers are astounding. And remember, this is just one set of cuts at one base.

There is a smarter way to reduce the size of government than to slash defense spending, threaten national security and hurt military families. In fact, the Republican-led House has already voted twice to replace the president’s sequester with targeted spending cuts based on real budget priorities.

President Barack Obama will ramp up his case for avoiding the across-the-board spending cuts over the next two weeks, senior administration officials said Tuesday.

With the cuts set to hit March 1, Obama will travel the country and host events at the White House aimed at raising the pressure on Republicans, the officials said

For two months, reporters and lawmakers have ignored a devastating report from the federal government itself, which warns that the nation’s current fiscal policy will lead to economic collapse.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO)—the personal auditor of President Obama and the federal government—released its assessmentof the federal government on January 17, 2013. The report’s findings illuminate just how dire America’s spending problem is and, therefore, how little the current cuts debated by Congress do to fix it.

The findings of the paper include these excerpts (emphasis added):

“The projections in this Report indicate that current policy is not sustainable… Preventing the debt-to-GDP ratio from rising over the next 75 years is estimated to require some combination of spending reductions and revenue increases that amount to 2.7 percent of GDP over the period.”
“It is estimated that running primary surpluses that average 1.0 percent of GDP over the next 75 years would result in the 2087 debt-to-GDP ratio equaling its level in fiscal year 2012, which compares with primary deficits that average 1.7 percent of GDP under current policies.”
“It is noteworthy that preventing the debt-to-GDP ratio from rising over the next 75 years requires that primary surpluses be substantially positive on average. This is true because projected GDP growth is on average smaller than the projected government borrowing rate over the next 75 years.”

Misunderstanding, misstatements and all the classic contortions of partisan message management surround the sequester, the term for the $85 billion in ugly and largely irrational federal spending cuts set by law to begin Friday.What is the non-budget wonk to make of this? Who is responsible? What really happened?

The finger-pointing began during the third presidential debate last fall, on Oct. 22, whenPresident Obama blamed Congress. “The sequester is not something that I’ve proposed,” Obama said. “It is something that Congress has proposed.” The White House chief of staff at the time, Jack Lew, who had been budget director during the negotiations that set up the sequester in 2011, backed up the president two days later.“There was an insistence on the part of Republicans in Congress for there to be some automatic trigger,” Lew said while campaigning in Florida. It “was very much rooted in the Republican congressional insistence that there be an automatic measure.”

The president and Lew had this wrong. My extensive reporting for my book “The Price of Politics” shows that the automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House and were the brainchild of Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors — probably the foremost experts on budget issues in the senior ranks of the federal government.

Obama personally approved of the plan for Lew and Nabors to propose the sequester to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). They did so at 2:30 p.m. July 27, 2011, according to interviews with two senior White House aides who were directly involved.

Have we put together a plan to cut $20 billion between March and October?" Graham said. "No, the House passed a plan to substitute sequestration.The Senate Republicans have yet to offer a plan.."

"We'll criticize everything he does," Graham acknowledged. "We'll say, 'Mr. President, it is now up to you to find this $85 billion in savings and we'll say it’s to make it easier for you.' But every decision he’ll make, we'll criticize."

President Obama insisted in a visit to Newport News, Va. Tuesday that he was “not interested in playing a blame game” over $85 billion in spending cuts set to begin Friday.

The problem?

Just moments earlier, he placed the blame entirely at the feet of GOP lawmakers, saying their resistance to higher taxes was blocking any deal to avert the so-called sequester.

“There are too many Republicans in Congress right now who refuse to compromise an inch,” Obama said at the Virginia shipping yard.