Redstate

Hint: They Don't

By Rep. Scott Garrett Posted in Congress | Congressional Contributors — Comments (2) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

This Wednesday, the House Budget Committee will spend $3 trillion of your money. If the new Democratic majority follows through on its promises, it will be a very expensive day for you.

Since taking power in January, Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats have added $6 billion in spending for 2007, added $20 billion to an emergency funding bill that has nothing to do with emergencies, and boasted that they plan to add billions of dollars to the President’s budget proposal that would have otherwise resulted in a balanced budget by 2012.

Democrats will claim that their budget is balanced, that they are fiscally responsible, and that they won’t raise your taxes. Unfortunately for us, none of that is true. According to a March 14th headline in the New York Times, “Senate Democrats Offer Spending Plan, But No Way To Pay For It.”

So what are the Democrats going to do to make up for the billions of dollars in extra spending they plan to add? They’re going to raise your taxes. Why? Because their own rules say that they have to. When Democrats took power in January, they instituted new rules that mandate either spending cuts or tax increases to pay for any new spending. We all know that Democrats have no plans to reduce spending, so their only option is to raise your taxes.

Read on . . .

It’s tough to grasp the real-world consequences when we start talking about spending a billion here or a trillion there, so let’s take a look at what a Democrat tax increase would do to a family of four from my district in North Jersey who earns $70,000 per year. According to a study done by the New York Times, that family saw their tax bill slashed by 20% after the Republican Congress passed tax cuts between 2001 and 2003. To roll those tax cuts back now would take around $1,500 out of that family’s budget today.

If you listened to what Democrat candidates were saying last year, you heard them talk about fiscal responsibility and budget discipline – they talked as if they were conservatives. They won on that message because after 12 years in power, Republicans lost sight of the fact that we are, have been, and should be the party that American taxpayers can trust with their tax dollars. November hurt, but we got the message loud and clear that fiscal conservatives are alive and well across the country. Wednesday will be the day that voters will see that the Democrats never repented of their tax-and-spend ways and that Republicans are ready to reclaim our rightful place as the party of fiscal responsibility.

My Republican colleagues and I will offer our own budget proposal that is based on three simple, common-sense principles. First, we are committed to balancing the budget by 2012 without raising your taxes. Second, we will not sacrifice pro-growth policies that have created 7.4 million jobs since 2003, slashed the deficit by 26% compared to this time last year, and kept $880 billion in the pockets of the people that earned it. Third, we understand that every dollar that goes into the federal budget comes out of an American family’s budget, and so every dollar must be spent wisely.

It’s sad that Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats won’t come clean about the impact that their federal budget proposal will have on family budgets across the country. I know that families in my North Jersey district and across the country are already paying far too much out of their paychecks to fund dubious projects like the rainforest in central Iowa that the Democrats inserted into the omnibus spending bill passed in February. While we won’t win every battle on Wednesday, you can be sure that my Republican colleagues and I will fight hard here in Washington to prevent tax-and-spend Democrats from taking an even bigger bite out of the family budget in order to feed the bloated federal budget.