Key Vote NO on the Senate’s Tax-Hiking, Big-Spending Budget
Dear FreedomWorks member,
As one of our millions of FreedomWorks members nationwide, I urge you to contact your U.S. Senators and urge them to vote NO on S.Con.Res. 8, the Senate’s budget resolution for Fiscal Year 2014.
Although it is good to see the Senate Budget Committee producing a budget and bringing it to the floor – an important step in returning to regular order in Congress – their current proposal simply does not meet our nation’s fiscal needs in any way. Given the incredible increases in the rates of spending and debt accumulation over the past few years, a responsible budget plan simply must set the federal government back on the path to balance. Instead, this proposal being offered by Senator Patty Murray and the Senate Budget Committee fails to ever achieve balance, and even increases spending next year.
Indeed, much of the $1.8 trillion in deficit reduction that will supposedly occur under this budget turns out to be false savings. First, the Senate budget gets rid of the cuts from the sequester entirely, which knocks out nearly a trillion in deficit reduction. Their plan also counts the expected drawdowns in war spending, which were already scheduled and are therefore not actually cuts. Finally, $275 billion in “savings” will supposedly come from health care entitlements, by getting rid of “waste”, but the plan remains unclear on how exactly this large sum will materialize. These are budget gimmicks, not real cuts.
Federal spending has reached such an unsustainable level that balancing the budget requires nearly $5 trillion in reductions from the next ten years of spending under current law. A good start in reaching that goal would be repealing ObamaCare, which could save at least $2 trillion over ten years. Removing the increasingly unworkable regulatory complex that the President’s so-called “Affordable Care Act” is placing upon the economy would stimulate more jobs and economic growth than anything in this entire budget plan.
More disappointing is that, after already having raised taxes on all income earners on January 1st, the Senate Democrats intend to increase tax revenues by a further $975 billion over ten years, supposedly by simply closing loopholes for businesses and individuals. While getting rid of the ridiculous maze of loopholes and deductions in the tax code is certainly a worthy goal, it is important that tax reform include lower rates as well. Corporate tax rates in the U.S. are already the highest in the entire developed world, which drives businesses overseas and destroys opportunities for economic growth and job creation here in the U.S.
In sum, the Senate Democrats have presented a budget plan that contains mostly non-existent spending cuts alongside massive, job-destroying tax increases, and would actually worsen, not improve, our nation’s economic situation.
Thus, I urge you to call your U.S. Senators and ask them to vote NO on the Senate budget resolution, S.Con.Res. 8. We will count the vote on this amendment as a KEY VOTE when calculating the FreedomWorks Economic Freedom Scorecard for 2013. The Economic Freedom Scorecard is used to determine eligibility for the FreedomFighter Award, which recognizes Members of Congress with voting records that support economic freedom.
Sincerely,
Matt Kibbe
President and CEO, FreedomWorks
