Fiscal Responsibility

The federal budget should reflect our country’s priorities and values. The next year’s budget should address the most important issues facing us today including: the war on terrorism, homeland security, our aging population and their rising health care costs, ensuring we have the best education system and maintaining the economic growth we’ve had for the past few years.

Unfortunately, the administration’s plan for the next fiscal year is to cut fundings in many of these critical areas. These cuts reflect priorites and values very different from mine. I am concerned about how these funding cuts will affect the state of Kansas and our country. If Congress continues to ignore the long-term effects of our current fiscal policy, we are forcing our children and grandchildren to pay the high price for the debts we are creating today.

As a member of the fiscally conservative House Blue Dog Coalition and as a member of the House Budget Committee, I have promoted a balanced approach to our nation’s budget. The very first bill I introduced in Congress would take the Social Security trust funds “off budget.” The budget surpluses should be used to protect Social Security and Medicare, to begin to pay down our $8.4 trillion national debt, and to cut taxes. I have consistently voted for budgets that would work to achieve those goals. The Blue Dog Coalition proposed a budget alternative in 2003 that would have balanced the unified federal budget by 2009 and balanced the budget by 2013 without using Social Security receipts. The Blue Dog budget would have done this through a combination of spending restraint and deferring a portion of additional tax cuts.