Young Guns : A New Generation of Conservative Leaders by Eric Cantor;Paul Ryan;Kevin McCarthy Page B
Authors: Eric Cantor;Paul Ryan;Kevin McCarthy
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in on a wave of genuine hope for change in 2008. They could have reached across the aisle and found real solutions to our challenges. They could have helped find commonsense answers—answers that wouldn’t satisfy the radical fringes of either party but would address the needs of the American people. Instead, they mistook the voters’ disgust with Washington for a mandate for a Far-Left agenda. They decided, in the words of the White House chief of staff, to “never let a serious crisis go to waste” and attempted to exploit the country’s economic anxiety to entrench huge new government entitlements.
President Obama has implored us to get beyond ideology and he’s right. Americans don’t care about dogma, be it of the Left or of the Right. They’re not looking to belong to a club and know all the secret handshakes. They just want to live their lives and make better lives for their families.
But Americans have been watching Washington as theDemocrats have exercised one-party rule over their government, and they’ve noticed a pattern. Remember how, at the beginning of his presidency, President Obama insisted he didn’t care if government was bigger or smaller, he just wanted it to be “smarter and more effective”? Well, it hasn’t escaped any of us that every proposal from the Obama administration for ostensibly “better and smarter” government has called for bigger government. There have been no instances in which the administration has equated more effective government with smaller government. As far as the Democrats are concerned, the causality only runs one way—to a European-style welfare state.
This pattern started with the disaster of the stimulus bill—and then it got markedly worse, if you can believe that. As small businesses and families across the country tightened their belts, President Obama pushed an additional $3.6 trillion spending plan through Congress in its 2009 budget.
Then the Democrats got in the auto business. Instead of allowing its union cronies and corporate CEOs to be held accountable for their poor decisions, they made the taxpayers accountable by buying Chrysler and General Motors. It was the bailout culture all over again, with Washington privatizing gains and socializing losses.
As work began on health care in the spring of 2009, their “big government is better government” approach to America’s problems came into sharp relief. Democrats and Republicans agree that our health-care system is broken infundamental ways. We agree that costs are too high, putting health care out of reach to millions of Americans without insurance, and endangering the coverage of millions of Americans with health care.
We disagree fundamentally, however, on how to fix our system. As Paul and Kevin will go into detail later, we believe the patient and her doctor should be the decision makers when it comes to health care, not a bureaucrat in the basement of the Health and Human Services building in Washington DC.
Many of those in power in Washington feel differently and, no surprise, their answer has been for more and more expensive government. Far from “bending the cost curve down,” their plan had a trillion-dollar price tag.
The result was, by June of 2009, President Obama and congressional Democrats had enacted or proposed policies that would accumulate more debt than was amassed by all the previous presidents in America’s 220-year history. They had put us on an unsustainable financial path, with the debt set to double over the next five years and triple in ten years. Under their out-of-control spending, within three years the federal government will spend $1 billion a day just on interest on the debt. Within ten years we will spend $2 billion a day, just to tread financial water and keep ourselves afloat.
Americans are genuinely—and rightly—concerned about the debt we are piling on future generations. They’reconcerned about the country’s financial future and their own
President Obama has implored us to get beyond ideology and he’s right. Americans don’t care about dogma, be it of the Left or of the Right. They’re not looking to belong to a club and know all the secret handshakes. They just want to live their lives and make better lives for their families.
But Americans have been watching Washington as theDemocrats have exercised one-party rule over their government, and they’ve noticed a pattern. Remember how, at the beginning of his presidency, President Obama insisted he didn’t care if government was bigger or smaller, he just wanted it to be “smarter and more effective”? Well, it hasn’t escaped any of us that every proposal from the Obama administration for ostensibly “better and smarter” government has called for bigger government. There have been no instances in which the administration has equated more effective government with smaller government. As far as the Democrats are concerned, the causality only runs one way—to a European-style welfare state.
This pattern started with the disaster of the stimulus bill—and then it got markedly worse, if you can believe that. As small businesses and families across the country tightened their belts, President Obama pushed an additional $3.6 trillion spending plan through Congress in its 2009 budget.
Then the Democrats got in the auto business. Instead of allowing its union cronies and corporate CEOs to be held accountable for their poor decisions, they made the taxpayers accountable by buying Chrysler and General Motors. It was the bailout culture all over again, with Washington privatizing gains and socializing losses.
As work began on health care in the spring of 2009, their “big government is better government” approach to America’s problems came into sharp relief. Democrats and Republicans agree that our health-care system is broken infundamental ways. We agree that costs are too high, putting health care out of reach to millions of Americans without insurance, and endangering the coverage of millions of Americans with health care.
We disagree fundamentally, however, on how to fix our system. As Paul and Kevin will go into detail later, we believe the patient and her doctor should be the decision makers when it comes to health care, not a bureaucrat in the basement of the Health and Human Services building in Washington DC.
Many of those in power in Washington feel differently and, no surprise, their answer has been for more and more expensive government. Far from “bending the cost curve down,” their plan had a trillion-dollar price tag.
The result was, by June of 2009, President Obama and congressional Democrats had enacted or proposed policies that would accumulate more debt than was amassed by all the previous presidents in America’s 220-year history. They had put us on an unsustainable financial path, with the debt set to double over the next five years and triple in ten years. Under their out-of-control spending, within three years the federal government will spend $1 billion a day just on interest on the debt. Within ten years we will spend $2 billion a day, just to tread financial water and keep ourselves afloat.
Americans are genuinely—and rightly—concerned about the debt we are piling on future generations. They’reconcerned about the country’s financial future and their own
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