Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) has found many ways to say he disapproves of the way the Senate operates in his three years serving, so far. But, perhaps the most effective messages come when he directly addresses what he sees as major problems that could affect your future.
Braun is fed up with Congress spending too much of your money and not budgeting properly.
“I think the process is broken. We don’t do regular order,” said Braun, in a Senate hearing Tuesday, expressing his disapproval of the appropriations process, in which he says proper budgeting is ignored.
“We’re talking about continuing resolutions because we have not had the ability and the political will to get this done by Sept. 30, of 2021.”
Not only is the budget timeline being largely ignored, but part of Braun’s gripe is that deficits are now often built in to the budget, rather than requiring that the budget be balanced.
“It is a system that has just gone completely out of control,” he said. “I’ll put one other doozy in there. Just a little over three years ago we were nearly $18 trillion in debt. Now we’re nearly 30.”
Much of the addition to the debt was in the form of relief bills, which added trillions a a time, passed during the pandemic, to keep the country’s economy from going belly-up.
Braun said that American lawmakers seem to have an attitude that is completely the opposite of the Congress following World War II and the enormous debt that was incurred by the war.
“We were savers. We were investors. We aid all that off and built the interstate highway system. That seems like a big story of fiction now,” he said. “So many people come to this institution wanting more and don’t even realize that the worst news is down the road when the Medicare trust fund goes completely bust in four and a half years, after paying into it since the 60s, Social Security in ten or eleven years.”
Braun later Tweeted a video of what he was talking about.
“There seems to be no end in sight. Both sides are responsible for the spending up to this point,” he said in the video.
3 comments
We not only need a balanced budget amendment, we need a clause it in that mandates a modest (3-5% annually) paydown on the DEBT.
Politicians only ever talk about reducing the DEFICIT for some reason, and that reason is that many voters are illiterate and do not know the difference. As Braun says, both sides are culpable for this.
The pandemic was bad luck for Trump, AND the country. I’ve got mixed feelings about stimulus checks. I would contend that the benefits handed out were not necessary for many of the recipients. The majority, however, found the money extremely useful, particularly mothers whose children whose youngsters were home from school. As for the national debt in general, present and past politicians in DC have terribly abused the Treasury. They’re spending money like there’s no tomorrow. Biden’s bills are failing because the sheer amount of money we’re dealing with can’t be explained or justified. The bottom line is that this country can’t go on like this and the majority of voters have realized this. Now, we have some 30 Democrats in the House who are not running for reelection. I think they can see the writing on the wall, namely, the mid-terms. It’s an interesting time to be alive…
I don’t know that I would classify COVID as “luck”. It did exactly what it was engineered to do, and the people who released it knew exactly what they were doing. The more information we see, the more censorship and cancellation we see from the current powers that be, the more it seems like COVID was an excuse to enable election fraud in 2020.
As far as the “stimulus” checks, free money is NEVER free. Long term, it will hurt everyone, including those single moms, far more than it helped anyone.