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Health & Fitness

The Federal Spending Engine -- Running Wide Open

Representative Rob Woodall put the nation's debt crisis in perspective when he said Washington views $20 billion as a rounding error.

Passions ran high within the standing room only crowd at Representative Rob Woodall’s August 25th Town Hall meeting in Snellville. And as passion has a tendency to do, it obscured perspective. The people in attendance who spoke out, railed against changes to Social Security and Medicare, excessive spending on social programs and defense, foreign wars, the high cost of complying with federal regulations, and various aspects of taxation. All of these are valid concerns, but they are simply emblematic of a federal business model that has become a spending engine that is running wide open, and fueled with taxpayer dollars.

Mr. Woodall brought perspective back into focus when he stated that $20 billion—which is the approximate annual budget for the state of Georgia -- is a rounding error in Washington. A rounding error. Consider that for a moment — a budget for an individual program can be off by $20 billion, yet the people doing the calculations don’t bat an eye, there are no consequences, and no urgency to improve the accuracy of future calculations.

Some self-anointed pundits have suggested increasing income tax rates on the wealthy as a means of reducing national debt. Such suggestions are no more than wishful thinking. IRS data clearly shows that the wished-for money simply doesn’t exist. If every wage earner with an annual taxable income in excess of $200,000 were taxed at a rate of 100 percent, it would take over seven years to pay off the national debt. And that assumes no additional debt accrued during that time. As Mr. Woodall stated, “We have a hole in the government spending bag. If we put more in it, it’s just going to fall out the bottom.”

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One means of “sewing up the hole” is to pass a balance budget amendment, something that Mr. Woodall believes will happen in the near future. Should that amendment pass, the long-term result will be the nation’s return to financial viability. Unfortunately, that transition won’t occur without some short-term pain. But that pain is a price we’ll all ultimately have to pay, and the longer the “hole in the spending bag” exists, the more intense the pain. As the old saying goes, “you can pay me now, or you can pay me later.” With respect to the expense of correcting a condition or situation, if you’ve ever chosen the later option, you know it’s always more expensive.

Members of Congress are supposed to represent the interests of their constituents. If you haven’t expressed your interests by voting, and by contacting your representative and senators, and encouraging your friends to do the same, you can bet we’ll all come to experience the pain of paying later.

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