Monday, February 20, 2012
Manchin’s Message: Putting Our Country’s Financial Future Ahead of Partisan Politics
Last week, we had two political proposals in front of us in Washington, both of which would drive the country deeper into debt without solving our long-term fiscal problems. As you might imagine, I am strongly opposed to both.
There is not one of you – not a person in West Virginia—who can understand why politics is trumping our future fiscal stability. I don’t think there’s a person in America who understands why in Washington, we can’t come together on a long-term fix to our problems. And for the life of me, I cannot imagine why our elected leaders – from both sides of the aisle – are continuing to play political football with our spending, our debt and our children’s futures. I didn’t come here to put the next generation into more debt. I came here to get them out of it.
The first of these wrong-headed proposals was the President’s fiscal year 2013 budget, which claims to be balanced, but only if we don’t count the exploding interest we must pay on our ever-increasing debt. Including interest, there is not a single year that this budget is balanced. At the end of a decade, this budget puts us an additional $6.7 trillion in debt. How does that make sense?
This is not the first time I’ve shared my concerns about this country going down the wrong fiscal track. And I can already hear some folks say: ‘Oh, there goes Joe Manchin again, blaming President Obama.’ Well, let me tell you, I’m a proud Democrat, but I’m a West Virginian and American first, and I would stand up and speak my mind whether our President is a Democrat or a Republican. I’m trying to be as understanding and respectful as possible in my critique – but what we’re doing just doesn’t make any sense to me, and I certainly can’t in good conscience try to tell the people of West Virginia any different.
The second proposal I strongly opposed last week is the so-called payroll tax cut extension, a policy that has failed to create jobs, will jeopardize Social Security and put the nation deeper in debt.
This Congress has voted twice since I’ve been here to tell Americans that they didn’t have to meet their obligations to Social Security, by cutting the contributions we make into this vital program. But as I warned this fall, along with my dear friend Senator Mark Kirk, now we’re talking about extending this policy indefinitely – because once something like this is enacted, even an act of Congress can’t reverse it. It takes an act of God.
I know that going back home and saying we voted for tax cuts is popular, but this is not a tax cut – this is a Social Security cut. Plain and simple. And knowing that we add 10,000 new beneficiaries to Social Security a day, and knowing that last year Social Security took in less than it paid out – how does that make any sense?
I voted against the payroll tax cut extension, and I was joined by 35 other Senators who share my concerns.
Let me tell you what I do support. If we are going to address our fiscal nightmare and stop digging a deeper debt hole, we must have meaningful tax reform that not only ensures that everybody pays their fair share, but that also strengthens our economy and creates jobs. We already have a template with substantial bipartisan support – split evenly between Democrats and Republicans in both the House and the Senate – that gives us a starting point to move forward. As I have said before, this Bowles-Simpson framework might not be perfect, but it has more support from both sides of the aisle than anything else I’ve seen since I got here. Not only that, it’s withstood the test of time better than any other proposal I’ve seen. To me, it is incomprehensible that the Bowles-Simpson framework is not being used a starting point to move us forward. We all want to put more money in the pockets of hard-working Americans, but we can’t accomplish this through a bunch of short-term, Band-Aid solutions that have no long-term effect.
Over the course of our history, this nation has succeeded because our parents and grandparents left our country better off than what they inherited from their parents and grandparents. I have said this: I do not want to be part of the first generation to fail to leave the United States in better shape for the next generation.
I do not intend to stand by and let party or politics destroy the hopes of the next generation. And I have urged all of our Congressional leaders—and our President – to put politics aside and realize one simple fact. Whether we are Democrats, Republicans or Independents, we all belong to the same party.
And that party is called America. And we will rise or fall together.
May God bless you, and may God bless the great state of West Virginia.
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The message should be much more important than the messenger but still people just don’t read or take the responsibility of independent thinking. It seems more important to know who said it, to be on the “right” side. I don’t like bullies. I don’t care for people telling others what they should and should not say or how to say it. That’s my right, my opinion. Don’t have any problem signing my name to this but for now I’ll just use…
To Not Me,