From the office of Congressman Andy Harris:
Today, Rep. Andy Harris joined a bipartisan coalition in rejecting the President’s request for a $2.4 trillion debt ceiling increase without any spending or deficit reductions. The vote signifies significant bipartisan support for substantial deficit reductions measures to accompany any debt ceiling limit increase.
“Marylanders sent me to Congress to end Washington’s spending spree – to get the economy moving and build an environment for positive job growth,” said Rep. Andy Harris. “A vote to yet again increase the debt limit without needed spending reductions would simply continue to kick the can down the road irresponsibly and would place the country on a path to financial disaster.”
The debt ceiling has been increased three times during the Obama Administration without any spending reduction measures. America’s debt is now nearly 98% of our total annual gross domestic product (GDP) and is quickly approaching levels at which other countries have experienced their economic collapse.
MacG says
End the two wars started by ‘W’ and repeal the Bush tax cuts on the top 2% wealth holders and the deficit will be 0! Really, do the math. A comment from an independent.
pizzle says
Um, OK. Did “W” twist “O”‘s arm to step up the game in AFG? Couldn’t “O” have just up and left there? Did “W” make “O” enter into a “not-war” with Libya?
While I agree that the war in Iraq should have never happened, for how many more years will folks continue to blame “W” for what “O” is doing?
Another comment from an Independent.
observer says
The plutocrats love this sniping, because it keeps us from seeing that both political parties are in their service. Both have decided to continue the huge tax cuts for the wealthy, without acknowledging that the reason for those cuts was that by 2000 the budget deficit had become a budget surplus.
Common sense would tell us to return to the tax rates that gave us fiscal stability and high employment with respectable pay. Instead, the rich get richer while the rest of us bicker and blame each other.
The real culprits are the corporate political class and the corporate media that serve it.
Proud to be Liberal says
What truly disgusts me is the sheer hypocrisy of politicians. Where were the GOP when they drove the debt ceiling through the roof? “On the day President Bush took office, the national debt stood at $5.727 trillion. The latest number (2008) from the Treasury Department shows the national debt now stands at more than $9.849 trillion. That’s a 71.9 percent increase on Mr. Bush’s watch. It’ll be the 7th time the debt limit has been raised during this administration. It’s the biggest increase under any president in U.S history .”
“As the fight begins on raising the U.S. debt limit, we should all remember that every Republican leader now posing as a hard-line fiscal conservative, such as Speaker John Boehner, Rep. Eric Cantor, Rep. Paul Ryan and Sen. Mitch McConnell, all voted to increase the national debt limit at least seven times under President George W. Bush. All of them, every time .”
“Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill compared lawmakers trying to block raising the debt ceiling to “al Qaeda terrorists.” “The people who are threatening not to pass the debt ceiling are our version of al Qaeda terrorists. Really,” O’Neill, Treasury secretary in the Republican administration of George W. Bush, said Wednesday in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s InBusiness with Margaret Brennan. “They’re really putting our whole society at risk by threatening to round up 50 percent of the members of the Congress, who are loony, who would put our credit at risk,” O’Neill said .”