Paul Ryan’s Opening statement at House of Representatives hearings where acting OMB Director Jeff Zients will testify on the Obama budget:
Welcome all, to this important hearing.
I’d like to thank our witness today, Mr. Zients, for coming to us under difficult circumstances.
With the departure of Mr. Lew from OMB just last month, we understand that you are testifying on short notice, and we recognize the difficulty of that.
And unfortunately, your job is even more difficult than usual – you are in the position of having to defend a budget that essentially dodges the most difficult challenges our country faces.
The New York Times has reported that this budget is, quote, “more a platform for the president’s re-election campaign than a legislative proposal.” After a careful review, it’s hard to disagree.
The Associated Press has reported – accurately in my view – that this budget, quote, “[takes] a pass on reining in government growth.”
Instead, it leaves the drivers of our debt – namely, the unsustainable growth of entitlement spending – quote, “largely unchecked.”
It takes a pass on real reform, even though the looming bankruptcy of these programs threatens to end the guarantee of security they provide for our nation’s seniors.
And it breaks the President’s promise to cut the deficit in half by the end of his term. As ABC News reported, this budget “does not come close.”
We’ve heard a lot of excuses from this administration for why the President broke his promise. But what we haven’t heard is any semblance of accountability.
To the best of my knowledge, no one in the White House has taken responsibility for this failure.Instead, we’ve gotten a blame game that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Jack Lew, your former boss, claimed that the reason Senate Democrats haven’t passed a budget in over 1,000 days is that the Republicans have threatened to filibuster.
This is simply false. As Mr. Lew surely knows, budget resolutions cannot be filibustered. They can be passed with a simple majority.
The real source of dysfunction in the Senate comes from members of the President’s own party, who have been unwilling – for almost three years now – to go on record in support of his budgets, or to pass budgets of their own.
More to the point, it wasn’t so long ago that the President’s party held total control of the White House and both branches of Congress – during which time his agenda was enacted in near totality:
* massive new spending and taxes
* the creation of new, open-ended entitlements
* a regulatory onslaught that hurt the economy
* and trillions of dollars in new debt.Even after all this, the new House Majority provided him with an opportunity to make good on his promise – to put aside the “chronic avoidance of tough decisions” that he once lamented.
We were – and we remain – eager to work with the President to stop spending money we don’t have… to reform government programs that aren’t delivering on their promises… and to enact pro-growth policies that raise revenue by getting our economy moving again.
Yet, instead of working with us, the President has demonized our ideas to save and strengthen health and retirement security programs.
He fought to keep his reckless spending spree going.
And he continues to insist on taking more money from hardworking Americans – not to reduce the debt, but to fuel his ever-higher spending.
The President’s ongoing refusal to advance serious solutions to our nation’s fiscal challenges represents a stunning dereliction of duty.
But I haven’t given up hope. I remain committed to working with my colleagues of both parties wherever common ground can be reached.
There is a growing bipartisan consensus for the reforms that are needed. But this consensus cannot succeed as long as the President of the United States remains on the outside looking in.
Unfortunately, that’s where he stands today. And my hope is that this hearing can shed some light on why.
Mr. Zients, we look forward to your testimony, but we do not envy your predicament. This unserious budget raises some very serious questions, and the American people deserve answers.
With that, I yield to the Ranking Member, Mr. Van Hollen.
HT: Powerline Blog
Paul Ryan makes a great case and I agree with virtually everything he said. Although, I have to admit he’s not accepting any of the responsibility for the large deficit. That part has to be acknowledged or we (GOP and conservatives) look disingenuous as we try to blame it all on the democrats.
It’s a fact that President Bush’s social policies were very leftwing and costly. Bush grew government and that’s a fact. In particular, I’m talking about expanding medicare’s role for the drug program and Homeland Security. He also caused trillions in war debt and that part is highly debatable if it was a wise expenditure and necessary for our national security. I don’t want to let the dems off the hook, so don’t get me wrong. But, if we are going to be honest brokers we have to accept at least some responsibility for this financial mess before we demand accountability from the Obama Administration and dems in the Senate. Do you agree with me on that?
Next, I went looking for Zients response on the net, but I didn’t find it. Please (anyone) let me know if its out there! I really want to read it.
I did find a transcript from Lew from last year and I thought it that was interesting. Want to see how a person could justify the kind massive deficit spending that comes close to devaluing the greenback and breaking the nations economy? Read his comments below.
Here’s the short form in case you don’t have the time: Lew is saying GOP tax cuts without the offsetting cuts in the budget, plus the Bush Administration’s unfunded Medicare drug plan, plus being handed an economy on the verge of failure, …all this resulted in the deficit spending. But, now we’re recovering and paying it down so its not so bad. Only we’re not paying it down, it’s still growing by huge numbers and government is still bloated.
Here is Lew’s testimony for your consideration:
TESTIMONY OF JACOB J. LEW DIRECTOR OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET BEFORE THE HOUSE COMMITTEE ON WAYS AND MEANS
February 16, 2011
Chairman Camp, Ranking Member Levin, and Members of the Committee, thank you for inviting me to testify this afternoon about the Presidents Fiscal Year 2012 Budget.
As the President has said, now that the country is back from the brink of a potential economic collapse, our goal is to win the future by out-educating, out-building and out-innovating our competitors so that we can return to robust economic and job growth. But to make room for the investments we need to foster growth, we have to cut what we cannot afford. We have to reduce the burden placed on our economy by years of deficits and debt.
This is the seventh budget I have worked on at OMB and the most difficult. It is a budget of shared sacrifice across the Federal government. It is a budget that makes tough choices to begin to tackle our major fiscal challenges. It is a budget that transitions from rescuing the economy to investing in our future. It is a budget that lives within our means in order to compete effectively in the world economy.
THEN AND NOW
The world has changed since I last served at OMB. When I left OMB in January 2001, we had balanced the budget and projected a surplus of $5.6 trillion over the next decade. In fact, we projected that the U.S. would effectively be debt-free by 2013. Unprecedented economic growth was certainly a key driver of budget surpluses. But in a virtuous cycle, a commitment by the President and the Congress to maintain a surplus reinforced expectation of Federal fiscal responsibility, which had a positive impact on interest rates and further helped to spur economic growth. This surplus was the result of year after year of fiscal discipline including budget agreements in 1990, 1993 and 1997. Presidents and congressional majorities from both parties reached across the aisle to make tough policy choices.
When I returned as OMB Director last November to a projected deficit of $10.4 trilliona sixteen trillion dollar swing in just over ten yearsthe fiscal picture could not have been more different. Large deficits were driven by two main factors: first, the worst economic downturn in a generation and policy response necessary to rescue the economy, and second, the decision in prior years to give two large tax cuts without offsetting them and to create a Medicare prescription drug benefit without paying for it.
Clearly, the challenges we face today are very different than those we faced more than a decade ago, when many of us worked together to balance the budget.
OUR RECORD
Bringing the Economy Back from the Brink
It is useful to begin by reviewing the state of our economy, because it shows how far we have come but also how far we need to go.
When the President took office the economy was in freefall. Real gross domestic product (GDP) was dropping at an annual rate of 4.9 percent after falling at an annual rate of 6.8 percent the previous quarter. The economy was losing an average of 783,000 private sector jobs per month. A steep decline in the stock market combined with falling home prices led to a significant loss of household wealth. Between the third quarter of 2007 and the first quarter of 2009, the real net worth of American households declined by 28 percent the equivalent of one years GDP.
In the last year, we have seen some encouraging signs that the trajectory has changed and that a recovery is beginning to take hold. An economy that had been shrinking for nearly a year is now growing againover the past six quarters, through the first quarter of FY 2011, real GDP has grown at an average rate of 3.2 percent. After nearly two years of job losses, more than one million private sector jobs were added to the economy in 2010. Capital and credit markets are functioning and gaining strength. And after teetering on the brink of liquidation just two years ago, Americas auto industry is posting healthy gains and returning money to the taxpayers who helped it through a period of turmoil.
What changed?
Just 28 days after taking office, the President signed into law the Recovery Act to create and save jobs and to invest in an economy able to compete in the 21st century. Approximately one-third, or $288 billion, of the Acts funds went to tax cuts for small businesses and 95 percent of working families. Another third, or $224 billion, was used for emergency relief for individuals and state and local governments. The final third was invested in projects to create jobs, spur economic activity, and lay the foundation for future sustained growth.
This investment had a powerful impact. The White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) estimates that the Recovery Act raised the level of GDP as of the third quarter of 2010 by 2.7 percentage points, relative to what it would have been absent intervention, and raised employment relative to what it otherwise would have been by between 2.7 and 3.7 million jobs in the same time frame.
And we have acted together to build on this growth. In March 2010, the President signed the Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment (HIRE) Act that provided subsidies for firms that hired workers who were unemployed for at least two months and other job creation incentives. In August, he signed into law $10 billion in additional aid to States to prevent the dismissal of 160,000 of teachers, police officers, and firefighters nationwide. In September, the President signed the Small Business Jobs Act. At the end of 2010, the President signed into law a bipartisan agreement on taxes that prevented a tax increase for middle-class families, extended unemployment insurance benefits for millions of Americans hardest hit by the recession, provided powerful incentives for business investment and job creation, and temporarily reduced the payroll tax which also would help spur macroeconomic demand. Economists from across the political spectrum agree that this bill will boost economic growth in 2011 by 0.5 to 1.2 percentage points.
From the Recovery Act to our financial stabilization plan, the Presidents tough choices over the past two years have helped to save the economy from a second Great Depression. But we are keenly aware that the recovery is not happening fast enough for the millions of Americans who are still looking for jobs, and our immediate task is to accelerate economic growth and job creation to get our fellow Americans back to work. That is why the President has proposed an up-front investment of $50 billion in building new roads, rails, and runways to upgrade our infrastructure and create new jobs. It is why the President is making key investments in innovation, clean energy, and education that will create jobs and make our workforce more competitive. And that is why the President laid out a commonsense approach to regulation that is pragmatic and evidence-based, and that will protect our health and safety and help lay the groundwork for economic growth and job creation.