On Thursday, Dec. 12, the House passed a bipartisan budget deal worked out by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan and his Senate counterpart, Senator Patty Murray. The deal passed overwhelmingly, with huge support from both sides.
I voted against it. It wasn’t an easy decision.
In short, the deal would replace the sequestration cuts for the military – something I have been adamantly and vocally supportive of. The cuts to the Pentagon have been so deep that they’ve gone far beyond cancelling wasteful procurement and research projects and have been cutting training hours for our troops. At this moment, and this is not a state secret, only 15% of our Army is combat ready. A full 85% are not trained well enough to remain safe and effective in the field. As a father of three soldiers, that is a serious, serious concern to me. I’ve been fighting for a solution on this issue for months and I don’t take opposing such a solution lightly.
In the end, it came down to two things. First, one of the major “cost offset” provisions in the bill would limit the annual COLA for military retirees – including, notably, those who were forced to retire due to service-connected injuries – to inflation minus one percent. The whole point of a cost-of-living-adjustment is to keep up with inflation and this proposal would explicitly do the opposite.
Second, there is a general tendency in Washington to “pay for” one year of spending increases with promised future cuts spread over a future decade. Far too often, those promised cuts are never realized while the increased spending is quickly forgotten.
It’s no secret that the Republicans and Democrats are extremely far apart on spending and tax policy. The fact that Rep. Ryan and Sen. Murray could find that common ground says a lot about their leadership. It wasn’t an easy task and they deserve a lot of credit. In the end though, the final product is once again proof to me that the only way Washington will ever find the discipline to seriously address our spending imbalance is with a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution.
State and local governments find a way to balance the books each year – not because it’s easy, not because they are universally more responsible than their federal colleagues, it’s because they don’t have a choice. The vast majority of states have some sort of legal requirement to balance their budgets each year. And local governments, by and large, simply don’t have the ability to borrow huge sums of money to pay for annual operating budgets. The federal government has no such legal requirement and can borrow far too easily from individuals and foreign nations.
I will continue pushing for a Balanced Budget Amendment because there simply is no other viable alternative to getting federal lawmakers to deal with the real and systemic imbalance in our spending and tax policy. I will also continue to ensure that this nation’s most sacred obligations are met and its responsibilities fulfilled. That means preserving a strong national defense and not balancing the budget on backs of those who risk themselves to keep the rest of us safe.
U.S. Rep. Rich Nugent represents The Villages in Congress.
