The Obama Budget, The CR, and a Jet Engine

On Monday, President Obama sent his proposed budget to Congress. It landed with a thud. Even though the President had promised to finally get serious about cutting deficit spending, his budget is mostly – more deficit spending – in fact, as far as the eye can see.

For example, his budget calls for adding nearly another $1.65 trillion to the national debt, which is higher than any other year in history. He completely ignored his own deficit commission’s recommendations. And thus the commission’s Democratic co-chair, Erskine Bowles said in frustration that Obama’s budget goes “nowhere near where they will have to go to resolve our fiscal nightmare.”

On a related issue, since the Democrat-controlled Congress last year failed to pass any budget at all, Congress is this week taking up a CR, or Continuing Resolution to fund the operation of the federal government and its various programs (Social Security, Medicare, our defense, etc.) until Congress and the President agree on a budget for the upcoming year.

Republicans under Speaker Boehner have promised to take a first step by cutting the spending by $100 billion. Although some groups and special interests are crying bloody murder at the cuts, I believe it only scratches the surface of what cuts need to be made if we are going to reverse the growth of government and spending that occurred over the last few years.

And finally, let me address one amendment to the CR which I have been working on – and that’s a proposal relative to funding for GE’s alternate Joint Strike Fighter engine. Even though I have voted to cut spending on a whole range of government programs, I believe that funding the GE engine will actually save money. GAO estimates that the savings will be $21 billion over time, and here’s why. Competition is good. The Quandrenial Defense Panel concluded as follows: “History has shown that the only reliable source of price reduction through the life of a program is competition between dual sources.”

GE of course is headquartered in our area (Evendale) and it’s been estimated that 1,000 jobs are at stake. I’ve been a supporter of the GE engine for the last five years, and will vote for it this week. I’ve also spent time over the last few weeks meeting with about 70 of the new Members of Congress who have not voted for or against the engine in the past. Having studied the issue in depth, and coming to the conclusion that the second engine could save up to $21 billion for the taxpayer, I’m quite sure I would support the second engine even if GE was not headquartered in my district.

As your Representative, I wanted to share my position on these important issues. As always, I’m open to hear your point of view.

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