Key Vote NO on the Ryan/Murray Budget Deal

As one of our millions of FreedomWorks members nationwide, I urge you to contact your representative and senators and urge them to vote NO on the budget plan proposed by Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) and Senator Patty Murray (D-Washington), respective chairs of the House and Senate budget committees.

Although the goal of returning to regular order by passing a budget through Congress is laudable—Congress hasn’t fulfilled this basic duty in five years—the result of this budget conference is not acceptable to fiscal conservatives. The proposed plan would increase spending $63 billion above the budget caps set by Budget Control Act of 2011—the only actual spending control achieved by Congress under the Obama Administration. The deal claims to offset these costs by increasing various fees, and by making small reforms to government pensions. These new fees aren’t being used to shrink government or balance the budget; they’re simply a mask to help hide the breaching of the budget caps.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the deal produces $22 billion in net deficit reduction over ten years. But the “savings” are back-loaded. Whenever Congress promises spending cuts or smaller deficits in the long term to cover spending increases in the short term, the promised “cuts” or “smaller deficits” often fail to materialize. Unless we make permanent reductions in entitlement spending, we can’t be sure that the higher spending levels in the early years won’t simply become the new, higher base from which still further spending hikes are enacted in the future.

Congressman Ryan claims that the plan doesn’t raise taxes. But whether the government collects more revenue by fees, taxes, tariffs, excises, or penalties, the government is still taking more of your money to pay for its spending addiction. Our federal government has a spending problem, not a revenue problem.

For these reasons, I urge you to call your members of Congress and ask them to vote NO on the Ryan/Murray budget plan. We will count their vote as a KEY VOTE when calculating FreedomWorks’ Economic Freedom Scorecard for 2013. The Scorecard is used to determine eligibility for the FreedomFighter Award, which recognizes Members of Congress who consistently vote to support economic freedom.

Sincerely,

Matt Kibbe

President and CEO

FreedomWorks