FABRIZIO GOWDY| OCTOBER 15, 2019| COLUMN

Nine years ago, when the Tea Party wave swept Republicans into power, a bold group of energetic conservatives promised Americans things would change. They railed, rightfully so, against the large budget deficits that Democrats were running up; they promised to balance the budget and get the ballooning national debt under control. They ran and won on fiscal conservatism.

Now, almost a decade later, it seems that fiery fiscal conservatism has vanished. We still are running up annual trillion-dollar deficits. We haven’t balanced the budget in almost 20 years. We are still passing pathetic continuing resolutions. Our national debt just passed $22 trillion and it’s growing exponentially. We are now one of the few countries in the world whose debt is greater than our gross domestic product (GDP). Interest payments financing our debt are the largest budget item behind entitlements, healthcare, and defense. To make things worse, just this past summer, we saw a sweeping new budget deal, cutting no spending and raising the debt ceiling yet again, that will plunge us further in debt and raise spending caps yet again.

How did we get to this point? Initially, we cut taxes without cutting spending, meaning we have much less tax revenue coming in to pay for a constantly expanding federal government. Congress also deals with the budget like a high schooler deals with a big project: it waits until the last minute and tries to rush it all through at once. That’s how we end up with congress voting on 2,000-page appropriations bills that nobody has taken the time to read just hours before the government is set to shut down. Rather than getting ahead of the ball and planning a comprehensive budget, we instead pass stopgap spending bills six months at a time to avoid government shutdowns.

Considering the manner in which Congress handles the budget, is it any wonder that there is so much wasted tax money? According to Senator Rand Paul’s 2017 “Waste Report” we spent $175,587 studying whether Japanese quail are more sexually promiscuous on cocaine, $500,000 studying whether smiling in a selfie makes you happier, and $5 million on a natural gas station in Afghanistan, a country where nobody has a car that runs on natural gas? If Congress did its job, this waste could be eliminated, and we could spend it on our crumbling infrastructure, our schools, and veteran’s benefits.

Fortunately, the solution to this problem is not very complicated. Congress just needs to take a few simple measures. They need to stop procrastinating on appropriations bills so that they can be taken care of in a timely and organized manner, without the looming threat of a shutdown. They need to agree to pragmatic compromises; Republicans are going to have to make some cuts to defense spending and Democrats are going to have to make cuts to entitlement programs. They need to close loopholes in the tax code to bring in more tax revenue.

Doing nothing is unacceptable. The first act of the Republican congress in 2017 was to pass a budget that never balances and adds 10 trillion dollars of new debt over a decade. What happened to the spine of the Republican Party? Are they only opposed to Democratic deficits? GOP lawmakers need to take a stand and start acting like real conservatives who champion fiscal responsibility. Otherwise, they will be remembered by future generations as the people who could have saved our country from drowning in debt but were too cowardly to act.

What Happened to the GOP's Fiscal Conservatism?

FABRIZIO GOWDY| OCTOBER 15, 2019| COLUMN