Key Vote YES on Budget Reconciliation Bill

Today FreedomWorks sent this Key Vote YES on Budget Reconciliation Bill to the U.S. House of Representatives.

Dear Representative:

On behalf of more than 700,000 FreedomWorks members nation-wide, I write to urge the U.S. House to VOTE YES on the 2006 Budget Reconciliation Act, also called the Deficit Reduction Act. This legislation would help restore the budget process and allow Congress to make important spending cuts and other policy changes.

America increasingly faces a fiscal crisis, and FreedomWorks strongly supports this effort to trim federal spending. Both mandatory and discretionary spending must be held in check. Mandatory spending comprises two-thirds of all federal spending and is growing by nearly 7 percent annually. It can no longer be taken off the table during the budget process, and for this reason the Reconciliation Act is a key step forward.

The bill contains spending reductions and common sense reforms to reduce the deficit by $50 billion. It also extends some limited but significant tax relief and reauthorizes welfare reform. The Reconciliation bill brings important new reforms to Medicaid as well. New Health Opportunity Accounts will allow a limited number of states to make available Health Savings-like accounts to Medicaid. The bill also restricts asset transfers, making it more difficult for wealthy seniors to hide assets to force Medicaid to pay for their nursing home care. Finally, the Reconciliation Act permits environmentally friendly drilling in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), an important step towards expanding the supply of energy available to the U.S. economy.

Of course, the bill isn’t perfect. It expands the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) by a staggering $1 billion dollars and increases funding for other questionable programs. And we’d like to see the tax and spending reductions go much, much further. But this is a good start towards restoring sanity to the Congressional budget process.

FreedomWorks will count your vote on the Budget Reconciliation Act as a KEY VOTE when calculating the FreedomWorks Economic Scorecard. The FreedomWorks Economic Scorecard is used to determine eligibility for the Jefferson Award, which recognizes Representatives with voting records that support economic freedom.

Sincerely,

Matt Kibbe
President and CEO
FreedomWorks