The Coalition to Reduce Spending is very pleased to announce that Pat McGeehan, candidate for US Senate in West Virginia, signed the Coalition’s Reject the Debt pledge. McGeehan joins a distinguished and growing list of candidates and elected officials willing to be champions against spending.

See our media release with more details below.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Pat McGeehan Signs Reject the Debt Pledge

US Senate Candidate joins the Coalition to Reduce Spending.

Alexandria, VA (June 17, 2013) — With the 2014 election cycle approaching and fiscal issues ever more present in national discourse, the Coalition to Reduce Spending has announced that US Senate candidate Pat McGeehan has become one of the first in this cycle to go on record with his fiscal promises.

On Monday, McGeehan said:

“Our nation is drowning in a sea of debt from out-of-control government spending. We must have real leaders who will stand up to Washington politicians and say ‘enough is enough.’”

In response to the news, Coalition President Jonathan Bydlak released the following comment:

In a time when the national debt and spending issues are at the forefront of the national debate and that of West Virginia, many candidates pledge fiscal responsibility and a commitment to reducing the nation’s looming deficit.    

But as we know, election promises are often as temporary as the elections that produce them. By signing Reject the Debt, Pat McGeehan has shown that he is serious about bucking this trend and  holding himself accountable to the people of West Virginia on this vital issue.

The Reject the Debt pledge asks candidates to go on record that they will consider all spending open for reduction, vote only for budgets that present a path to balance, and vote against any appropriations bills that increase total spending or fund new programs without offsetting cuts in others.

As of this writing, McGeehan is the only candidate in his race to go on the record to Reject the Debt.

We are very pleased to announce that Coalition Founder and President Jonathan Bydlak is among the featured speakers at this year’s upcoming Liberty Political Action Conference! Other featured speakers include Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), former Congressman Ron Paul, Leadership Institute President Morton Blackwell, and many others.

LPAC 2013 will take place from September 19th-22nd at the Westfields Marriott in Chantilly, VA. The Liberty Political Action Conference, or LPAC, brings together grassroots activists together from all across the nation for a unique conference experience that ranges from socializing to big-name speakers to hands-on training.

We’ll see you there!

Club for Growth reports on an aspect of the recently passed “Farm Bill” that has gone mostly unnoticed or taken for granted in the media.

This week, Senate Republicans and Democrats passed the 1,102-page bill that represents $963 billion in spending, while Speaker Boehner expressed support for the House version, which he identified as more “conservative” — that is, it cost only $950 billion. As Club for Growth points out, there was discussion over things such as food stamp cuts, and both the Senate and the House claimed to be saving taxpayer money… even though the bill’s price tag has increased 60% just over the last five years.

But that’s not even the outrageous part.

As Club for Growth notes,

“agricultural subsidies account for only about 20 percent of the farm bill.  The remaining 80% can be roughly attributed to the massive food stamp program.  These two completely separate issues are united in an unholy marriage so that rural legislators from Agriculture states will vote for their subsidies and urban legislators representing districts hooked on the Obama-entitlement state receive their food stamps. And taxpayers are left holding the bag.”

The fact that this bill is such a vast collection of spending not even related to agriculture is why, as the Club for Growth says, one should refer to “Farm Bill” in quotation marks. Because like many government programs, it has strayed so far from its initial purpose as to be unrecognizable.

The farm subsidy program is hardly new. Created under the Agriculture Adjustment Act in 1933 as a way for struggling family farmers to get back on their feet during the Depression, it has become an essentially permanent institution, passed every five years and costing $14 billion annually over the last 10 years. As with many government programs, it often doesn’t even help those for which it was initially intended — a common criticism is that the wealthiest farmers receive the most benefits, and as of 2007 census data, roughly 62 percent of American farmers don’t receive any subsidies at all.

By this week’s vote, the House and Senate, full of self-proclaimed fiscal conservatives, carried on a long and unfortunate tradition. The fact that such mind-boggling spending levels are simply accepted by those across the political spectrum illustrates why our pledge is so vital. Anyone can proclaim willingness to address fiscal issues — and then turn around and vote in such enormous spending increases once in office.

The basics of agriculture and the American economy have changed dramatically since this bill’s inception, and yet it remains, a monolith of wasteful government spending. The farm bill seems ultimately rather worthless at its ostensible goal of helping small family farmers. However, it is worthwhile in at least one way: by being a near-perfect illustration for the institutionalized spending culture that we fight against.

Yesterday, House Appropriations Committee members battled for hours over sequestration cuts to upcoming Pentagon spending. Democratic members criticized the bill for what they called “ignoring” FY2014′s roughly $50 billion of sequestration cuts set to take effect in the fall. Others critiqued its cuts to domestic spending to offset Pentagon spending. Ranking Member Nita Lowey, D-N.Y. classified it as “good” only “if considered on its own merits.” Several House Democrats even said that the GOP-crafted appropriations bill “breaks the law.”

And then they helped pass it.

Representing nearly $513 billion, the bill passed easily, with most Democratic members voting in favor despite harsh debates earlier, as John T. Bennett reports for DefenseNews.com

Congress and partisan fighting are almost innately connected. So much of what happens in our nation’s capital comes down to these fights — right against left, conservative against liberal. Congress, we are told, is in a gridlock. Congress cannot accomplish anything. And so on. Often, though, events come along that remind us that when Congress does choose to work together, the results should concern us just as much as the gridlock, if not more so.

This bill is not altogether a step in the wrong direction. For one, according to House Appropriation Committee Chairman Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Ky, the legislation proposes “a decrease of more than $5 billion below last year’s enacted level.” For another, there is apparently at least some effort at offset included. The bill shows signs that members are beginning to recognize the gravity of the fiscal situation and seek some new directions

However, the measure still includes the unfortunate habit of giving the Pentagon more funding than it actually requests. Although yesterday’s measure was $3.4 billion smaller than the Pentagon’s 2014 base budget request, it also included $85.8 billion in a war-funding section that totaled $1.5 billion more than the Pentagon sought. It was also about $28.1 billion above the sequester level. Willingness to consider offsets is a step in the right direction, but offsets should not be limited to domestic programs.

This measure included some things worth celebrating and some areas of concern, but at the end of the day, yesterday was just another in a long train of examples of the almost reverent deference given to Pentagon spending, regardless of circumstances. Our national debt continues to soar to ever-more absurd proportions, and Pentagon spending continues to make up a sizable portion of the spending at the core of the problem. This habit of excluding Pentagon spending from any scrutiny is a dangerous one, and now more than ever, it should be changed.

On Tuesday, Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) took the opportunity to chastise the $24 billion of wasteful federal spending on IT services. According to the Hill, the finding that he was referencing came from a recent report presented by the Government Accountability Office, which found billions of dollars of waste and duplication on IT spending in various departments throughout the federal government.

Sen. Coburn then went on to make the point that this amount–$24 billion—is roughly equivalent to 30 percent of the sequester. This goes to show that if spending cuts really need to be made (we believe they do), it’s not a problem of not having things to cut. Really, it’s an issue of (1) finding where the marginally wasteful spending is, and (2) gathering together the will power and political coordination among legislators to actually implement those cuts.

Several months ago, during late 2012 and the end of last February, Washington politicians went through dramatized debates over how to resolve the issue of impending automatic sequestration cuts. Most people did believe that the process of sequestration as a method for cutting spending is arbitrary and not well-formulated. After all, the undesirable nature of sequestration cuts is the reason why it was originally devised as an incentive to encourage the 2011 “Supercommittee” to agree to make $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years. Needless to say, the Supercommittee failed, and all subsequent efforts to engender a budget agreement in place of sequestration have failed as well.

The divide on the issue was/is generally as follows: Republicans want to replace the arbitrary sequestration cuts with more deliberated cuts to certain elements of government spending believed to be wasteful. Many Republicans have sought to refocus the cuts away from the military and onto domestic discretionary spending. On the other hand, Democrats propose an outright repeal of the sequestration cuts, with any replacement being far less important and unspecified, or partially rooted in revenue increases that go beyond what was raised from the fiscal cliff deal. Often, Democrats have paid lip service to the idea of a mixture of revenue increases and spending reductions, but their proposals have shown to fall largely on revenue increases.

The example of wasteful IT spending is a very beneficial contribution to the ongoing debate over sequestration cuts. Arbitrary cuts do not have to be levied if useful cuts can be made to legitimately wasteful and duplicative programs. The deficit can be reduced while elements of government believed to be more essential can be preserved. The case of wasteful IT spending shows that there is not truly a lack of spending that can be cut, but rather a blindness to much of the waste that already exists, and political gridlock that prevents us from taking actions to cut it.

Even if Democrats harbor the philosophical belief that the federal government should do more, it is still unreasonable for them to reject any spending-side replacements to sequestration cuts. Essentially, such a position is asserting that nowhere in the $3.8 trillion worth of federal spending is there a measly two percent of it that is unnecessary and can be gotten rid of. As columnist George Will put it:

The sequester has forced liberals to clarify their conviction that whatever the government’s size is at any moment, it is the bare minimum necessary to forestall intolerable suffering.

Same goes for Republicans regarding defense—there is no reason to believe that the current level of military spending is the bare minimum necessary to keep Americans from suffering intolerable danger from abroad. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that there is plenty of waste within the Pentagon budget that can be slashed.

Sen. Coburn’s point regarding wasteful spending on IT activities is a rather insightful one, because it proves that while politicians may be gridlocked over spending cuts due to false perceptions of the dire necessity of nearly all spending, the answer to where cuts can easily be made is hidden in plain sight.