OPED: Biden's Budget Blunder
Since being sworn in to represent the people of Eastern Kansas, I have focused on addressing our ever-growing national deficit and combating the left’s outlandish spending habits. While I have been working to protect your hard-earned income from funding the costly and ineffective policies being pushed by Congressional Democrats, President Biden is doubling down on these bad policies through record budgets and out of control spending. By spending money recklessly, this administration will be passing on massive amounts of debt to our children and grandchildren.
This wasteful spending problem is not new and will not be going away, and it must be addressed. We need to be finding a way to decrease our national debt that is currently clocking in at over $28 trillion. While the debt is growing at an exponential rate, President Biden and the Democrats are pushing pricey policies, rejecting any offers for bipartisan compromise, and at the end of May, introduced a $6 trillion budget showing they don’t care about the national debt.
President Biden’s record budget not only would raise government spending to more than $69 trillion within the next ten years, but would also create $17 trillion in new debt over the same period. This is an astronomical amount of money that will be funded by your paychecks. To put this amount of new debt into perspective, it is almost equal to the total debt of the United States from 1789 to 2020 and would cost every American family over $49,000 if it were spread out over each household.
We are already seeing the effects of Biden’s dangerous spending with the price of goods rising to record levels over the past year, like gas going up 22%, food up 2.4%, and lumber up by over 250%. This proposed budget would drive up spending even further, thus further weakening our economy, raising your taxes, causing the value of the U.S. dollar to plummet, and killing American jobs by sending them overseas.
Biden’s budget blunder does not stop there. Even though this budget is the largest ever, it doesn’t include funding to some of our country’s most vital programs and departments. Some of these programs and departments that would be affected include our country’s military and the Department of Homeland Security. Both our military and the Department of Homeland Security need more resources, not less, if we are to defend the U.S. from foreign attacks and secure our borders.
This budget was also the first in decades to not include funding for the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal tax dollars from funding abortions. Kansans will not stand for this, which is why I am working with my pro-life colleagues to make sure that the budget passed by Congress will include the widely-supported Hyde Amendment.
What the President and the radical left want to do to our country is reckless. We are already seeing the effects of Biden’s irresponsible economic policies with the highest inflation in 13 years, businesses struggling to fill job openings, and the highest gas prices in 7 years. We need to address our spending and the national debt now instead of continuing to kick the can down the road.
The Democrats are blind to the fact that our country has a spending problem, not a revenue problem. That is why I am working every day to lower your taxes, fight against President Biden’s radical budget proposal, and balance our country’s budget. In fact, one of my first actions as a member of Congress was to co-sponsor a constitutional amendment that would require Congress to balance its yearly budget and safeguard our country from spending more than it takes in. Hardworking Kansans are having to balance their checkbooks every day and want to know why their President refuses to do the same with our government’s budget.