Grassley Slams Obama's Budget, Tax Increases

[Herb Schaffler]

Grassley Slams Obama's Budget, Tax Increases


Tuesday, 02 Feb 2010 07:03 PM


By: Dan Weil
Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, doesn’t think too much of President Obama’s $3.8 trillion budget proposal for fiscal 2011.

“Washington is an island surrounded by reality,” he told Newsmax.TV’s Kathleen Walter.

“This budget, as a document coming from Washington, DC, is a perfect example of not being in the real world. The real world is that taxpayers out there throughout grass roots America haven’t seen big increases like the federal budget has.”

See Video: Sen. Chuck Grassley dissects the Obama budget and its threat to economic growth - [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link.

Grassley, the senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, says Obama’s partial budget freeze proposal “is a small step in the right direction.”

But it doesn’t mean much, because the parts of the budget that would be frozen already saw 21 percent increases in the past 15 months, he says.

It makes no sense to raise spending like that when “working Americans – the people on Main Street, not on Wall Street – haven’t seen raises,” Grassley said. “So they don’t understand where Washington is coming from, spending so much money and leaving a legacy of debt.”

As for the budget deficit, it has averaged less than 3 percent of GDP over the last 40 years, he explains. Now the gap is three times that amount.

“Even if we get where they [the White House] want to go over a long period of time, it’s still going to be 2.5 times that 40-year average,” Grassley said. “It’s not something that’s sustainable. It’s going to lead to hyperinflation, or it’s going to really put the U.S. out of competitiveness with the global economy.”

Grassley opposes Obama’s plan to raise taxes for those making more than $250,000 a year. “The best thing Obama could do is to announce he isn’t going to have a tax increase,” Grassley said.

“It would bring some certainty. That would particularly help small business … We’ve got to concentrate on helping small business if we want to get unemployment down. Increasing taxes on people making more than $250,000 isn’t that.”

The fiscal stimulus package approved a year ago doesn’t help small business either, Grassley said. “Only 0.5 percent of that $800 billion went to small business. That’s one place it’s being misspent.”

In addition, too much of the stimulus money went to government hiring, he says. “The governments – federal, local and state – consume wealth, they don’t create wealth. Too many people are in the wagon. We need more people pulling the wagon.”

Grassley has launched an investigation into the stimulus program. He’s trying to find out what’s going right and what’s going wrong with the expenditures.

“I presented tables to [White House budget director] Peter Orszag that lay out one government agency saying we spent this much money and another government agency on the same program saying we spent this much money,” Grassley explained.

“I want to know what the truth is, and I want to know how many jobs it created.”

Grassley says what he really seeks is transparency. “We’re talking about a president that ran on a platform of more transparency and more accountability,” he said. “We’re not getting more transparency. And if you don’t have transparency, then you can’t get accountability.”

The senator says Congress should start over on healthcare reform. He recommends small, incremental steps. “Don’t try to bite off more than we can chew. Don’t try to restructure one-sixth of the economy at one time.”

He complains that Democrats didn’t seek bipartisan support on healthcare reform. “Since they are the ones that decided to go partisan, I think it is up to either the president or to the congressional leaders come to the Republican leaders to see what they can do to make this bipartisan.”

The Democrats should start by abandoning their opposition to medical malpractice reform, selling insurance across state lines and rationing.

Grassley opposes the Obama administration’s cap and trade tax proposal. “You’d be increasing taxes on everybody through increasing the cost of energy.”

Cap and trade would be more destructive to the economy than Democratic healthcare reform plans would, he says. It amounts to an energy tax of $1,800 to $3,000 on each household.

“It’s detrimental to our economy. It’s going to move all our manufacturing jobs to China. We shouldn’t be doing things like that during a recession,” Grassley said.

See Video: Sen. Chuck Grassley dissects the Obama budget and its threat to economic growth - [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link.


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