Obama Budget: Abdication of Duty

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As our nation teeters on the edge of financial ruin, President Obama today released his budget proposing $1.6 trillion in deficit spending this year alone, $8.7 trillion in new spending and $2 trillion in new taxes over the next ten years – all the while ignoring the looming collapse of Social Security and Medicare. The President’s budget proposal represents an abdication of his duty to present a budget that puts our nation’s fiscal house in order.

This president can pull our nation back from the brink of financial ruin by proposing deep spending cuts in non-essential federal programs that are siphoning money out of the private sector and throwing it away in wasteful and harmful government programs and by proposing deep cuts in the onerous level of taxation on individuals and businesses to spur economic growth. A larger and freer private sector coupled with a smaller and less intrusive public sector will result in balanced budgets for the government and prosperity for the American people.

This president also reveals a lack of candor and courage when he ignores the looming collapse of Social Security and Medicare. The unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare approach $100 trillion. The President’s own debt commission has revealed that three programs – Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid – now consume 100 percent of federal revenue and that everything else is paid for with borrowed money. The President’s debt commissioners called current budgetary trends a cancer "that will destroy the country from within" unless checked by tough action in Washington.

President Obama’s response to his own debt commission is to propose more deficit spending, new federal programs, greater annual budget deficits and continued support for Obamacare, his massive new entitlement program – everything his own debt commission is warning him against. We need leaders in the White House and the Congress who will acknowledge the white elephant in the room and propose ways to reduce the cost of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the other entitlement programs now before it is too late. All it takes is some courage.

Marc A. Scaringi, Esq. (R-PA) is a lawyer and owner of Scaringi & Scaringi, PC, a Harrisburg-based law firm and is a candidate for the Republican nomination to the United States Senate in 2012.