Key Vote No: Obama-Pelosi-Reid Budget

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On behalf of hundreds of thousands of FreedomWorks members nationwide, I urge you to vote “No” on the Obama-Pelosi-Reid budget being considered this week.  Their budget taxes too much, spends too much, and borrows too much.  And, potentially worst of all, it would open the door for socialized medicine and a massive energy tax to be enacted later this year without substantial debate through the reconciliation process.

No one voting for this budget will have any creditability in the future as a fiscal conservative.

The budget increases taxes by around $1.5 trillion, including taxes on investors, small business, and energy.  Economists say when you want less of something, tax it.  With the taxes in this budget we will get less investment, less small business, and less energy.  This is the opposite of what we need in a recession.  The mandate President Obama received with his election was to cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans.  This budget raises taxes on 100 percent of Americans.

The budget increases spending to dangerous levels.  It spends so much that it would double in just over five years the federal debt that has taken over 200 years to accrue.  If the deficits proposed in this budget are realized, the eleven highest deficits in American history will be the eleven years from 2009-2019.

To fund these record deficits, this budget asks the federal government to borrow too much.  The borrowing levels are already getting to the point where the foreign lenders from whom the government borrows to fund much of this debt are balking.

As the Washington Post reports, “Senate Democrats are increasingly receptive to using a controversial budget shortcut to ease passage of health-care reform legislation.”  As any savvy Capitol Hill insider will know, this refers to the plans to include reconciliation language in the budget bill so that only 51 votes will be needed later in the year when health care socialization or cap-and-trade taxes are considered. 
This is the equivalent to using the “nuclear option” to pass judges, and would signal the end of any interest in bipartisanship in this Congress.  This alone should be reason enough for any moderates in Congress to oppose this budget.

On behalf of our FreedomWorks activists, I again urge you to vote “No” on the Obama-Pelosi-Reid budget and will count your vote as a KEY VOTE when calculating the FreedomWorks Economic Freedom Scorecard for 2009. The FreedomWorks Economic Freedom Scorecard is used to determine eligibility for the Jefferson Award, which recognizes members of Congress with voting records that support economic freedom.