Reps. Gary Peters (D-MI), John Adler (D-NJ), Peter Welch (D-VT) and Jim Himes (D-CT), should be commended for forming their new Spending Cuts and Deficit Reduction Working Group.
Peters told The Macomb Daily: “Congress has to get serious about reducing the deficit now. Transforming the deficits generated over the past decade back into the surpluses of the 1990s will take rooting out and slashing wasteful spending. We have formed this work group to seek areas to cut billions in unwarranted spending and subsidies.” Huzzah!
To that end the group has identified wasteful discretionary spending, subsidies and tax loopholes from the departments of Energy, Treasury, Housing and Urban Development, Defense and Agriculture that will cut a total of $72 billion from the deficit over ten years. Not a bad start.
But each of these representatives also voted for President Barack Obama’s $862 billion economic stimulus package … a 100% deficit spending-funded measure that has completely failed to meet the Obama administration’s own objective benchmarks. It will take almost 120 years of these cuts just to undo the damage to deficit caused by President Obama’s failed stimulus.
And that does not even get into the real threat to our nation’s bottom line: entitlement spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — a threat made much, much worse by Obamacare (which Peters, Welch, and Himes all voted for, by the way).
UPDATE: Rep. Adler did not vote for Obamacare.