Editor,
Once again, federal spending is reaching its debt limit. I suspect, as last year, President Obama will again threaten all of our grandmothers by withholding grandma’s Social Security check, until the debt limit is increased again. Last August, I protested outside the Nicholas County Courthouse against Obama’s threat to withhold grandma’s Social Security check.
We have 100 senators in the U.S. Senate who are the most powerful 100 in the world. These senators refuse to put forth a federal budget and take control of the incredible rising federal deficit.
This runaway federal spending is once again approaching the national debt limit. It is time for the citizens of West Virginia to show these 100, or should I say West Virginia’s two senators, just who the boss is and where the power lies. I, therefore, propose the following resolution: We, the undersigned, petition Governor Earl Ray Tomblin of West Virginia to call West Virginia’s two United States Senators John D. Rockefeller IV and Joe Manchin to an assembly of the West Virginia State Legislature and West Virginia State Supreme Court to explain their failure to pass a budget for the United States Government.
They have not passed legislation for a budget, of any type, since 2008. They instead, have passed a “Continuing Resolution” of the 2008 budget. This Continuing Resolution, unfortunately, has built in budget increases for all United States Bureaucracies, which are covered under the current 2008 budget. These built in increases of monies, in the current 2008 budget have resulted in, with other issues, the current runaway deficit. The lack of action by these two United States Senators, has resulted in an escalation of the current United States Government deficit.
The people of West Virginia want and need to know why John D. Rockefeller IV and Joe Manchin are not doing their Constitutional duty to the citizens of West Virginia and the citizens of the United States of America, by not passing a budget for the United States of America.
Duane Borchers Sr.
Craugsville
The key is fiscal year 2009 -- and who you blame for it. By any measure, spending popped that year. If you’re looking at raw dollars, it rose by $535 billion. And “the 2009 fiscal year,” “which Republicans count as part of Obama’s legacy, began four months before Obama moved into the White House.”
It is proper that, since 2009, spending has remained high in order to support a badly wounded economy and help unemployed workers and struggling families. The question isn’t which president to blame for elevated spending in 2009 -- the blame there goes to the financial crisis, though Republicans conveniently forget that in order to score points. The question is where should spending be now?
The federal fiscal year stretches, somewhat weirdly, from October 1 to September 30. So fiscal year 2009 began in October 2008.
And that’s the point. If you attribute most of fiscal year 2009 to George W. Bush then, after adjusting for inflation, federal spending under Obama has actually dropped by 0.1 percent. Politifact checked the numbers and agreed: “Using raw dollars, Obama did oversee the lowest annual increases in spending of any president in 60 years,” they write. “Using inflation-adjusted dollars, Obama had the second-lowest increase -- in fact, he actually presided over a decrease.”
Republicans point out that Bush was negotiating with a Democratic Congress. His 2009 budget request asked for considerably less money than we actually spent. And Obama actually signed the last part of the budget in March 2009. All of which is true. In 2010 and 2011, Obama was negotiating with a Republican Congress, which is part of what restrained his spending. That’s also true.
So far, the only fact that really matters, which is that the economy began to collapse in late-2008, and continued to crater through much of 2009. Or, as Donald Marron, director of the Tax Policy Center, puts it, “the real issue is that 2009 is an anomaly driven by crisis.”
But Republicans don’t want to admit that they bear substantial responsibility for the economic policy of the last few years. If they did, then it would be hard to argue that the economy’s performance in 2010 and 2011 is all Obama’s fault. And the Obama administration doesn’t want to clearly say that we should have been spending more in recent years, even if that’s what they believe, and what they proposed, because it polls poorly. And so here we are.