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Dear FreedomWorks member, As one of our millions of FreedomWorks members nationwide, I urge you to contact your U.S. Senators and urge them to vote NO on S.Con.Res. 8, the Senate’s budget resolution for Fiscal Year 2014.   Although it is good to see the Senate Budget Committee producing a budget and bringing it to the floor – an important step in returning to regular order in Congress – their current proposal simply does not meet our nation’s fiscal needs in any way.  Given the incredible increases in the rates of spending and debt accumulation over the past few years, a responsible budget plan simply must set the federal government back on the path to balance.  Instead, this proposal being offered by Senator Patty Murray and the Senate Budget Committee fails to ever achieve balance, and even increases spending next year. Indeed, much of the $1.8 trillion in deficit reduction that will supposedly occur under this budget turns out to be false savings.  First, the Senate budget gets rid of the cuts from the sequester entirely, which knocks out nearly a trillion in deficit reduction.  Their plan also counts the expected drawdowns in war spending, which were already scheduled and are therefore not actually cuts.  Finally, $275 billion in “savings” will supposedly come from health care entitlements, by getting rid of “waste”, but the plan remains unclear on how exactly this large sum will materialize.  These are budget gimmicks, not real cuts. Federal spending has reached such an unsustainable level that balancing the budget requires nearly $5 trillion in reductions from the next ten years of spending under current law.  A good start in reaching that goal would be repealing ObamaCare, which could save at least $2 trillion over ten years. Removing the increasingly unworkable regulatory complex that the President’s so-called “Affordable Care Act” is placing upon the economy would stimulate more jobs and economic growth than anything in this entire budget plan. More disappointing is that, after already having raised taxes on all income earners on January 1st, the Senate Democrats intend to increase tax revenues by a further $975 billion over ten years, supposedly by simply closing loopholes for businesses and individuals.  While getting rid of the ridiculous maze of loopholes and deductions in the tax code is certainly a worthy goal, it is important that tax reform include lower rates as well.  Corporate tax rates in the U.S. are already the highest in the entire developed world, which drives businesses overseas and destroys opportunities for economic growth and job creation here in the U.S.   In sum, the Senate Democrats have presented a budget plan that contains mostly non-existent spending cuts alongside massive, job-destroying tax increases, and would actually worsen, not improve, our nation’s economic situation. Thus, I urge you to call your U.S. Senators and ask them to vote NO on the Senate budget resolution, S.Con.Res. 8. We will count the vote on this amendment as a KEY VOTE when calculating the FreedomWorks Economic Freedom Scorecard for 2013. The Economic Freedom Scorecard is used to determine eligibility for the FreedomFighter Award, which recognizes Members of Congress with voting records that support economic freedom. Sincerely, Matt Kibbe President and CEO, FreedomWorks File Attachments KVN_2013-03-21_Senate_Budget_-_NO.pdf505.37 KB

This week the House and Senate will likely vote on their budget plans, along with a few conservative alternative budgets.  To help you see where each plan stands in terms of spending restraint and economic growth, we have put together our second annual "Budget Report Card", which rates each of the major plans according to various economic criteria. This year even Paul Ryan's House plan balances in 10 years, while Rand Paul and the Republican Study Committee plans balance in 5 and 4 years, respectively. The Senate Democrats' plan, unfortunately, never reaches balance. But for the third straight year, Senator Paul's budget wins "best in show" for not only balancing quickly, but for shifting taxes to a single-rate flat tax and truly reforming all three of the "big three" entitlements (Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security).  Most impressively, the Paul budget is the only one to fully tackle Social Security reform by allowing individuals to opt into private accounts. Another reform that the Paul budget contains that all the others lack - it makes participation in Medicare and Social Security truly voluntary. (To see the following charts full-sized, click the link at the bottom of this post): The House passed a version of Paul Ryan's budget in both 2011 and 2012, but their budget failed in the Senate each time. Meanwhile, if the Senate were to pass any budget resolution, it would be the first time they have done so in nearly four years.  The government has been running on temporary continuing resolutions during that time. File Attachments 123_budget_factsheet.pdf42.92 KB

Dear FreedomWorks member, As one of our millions of FreedomWorks members nationwide, I urge you to contact your senators and urge them to support two amendments sponsored by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) that would stop major accounting gimmicks in Washington. The first amendment is a point of order against legislation that increases direct spending in any of the four 10-year periods beginning after 2023. The second amendment is a point of order against legislation that increases the deficit in any of four 10-year periods beginning after 2023. These amendments would stop Washington from hiding the true cost of legislation by shifting costs beyond the ten-year CBO window. Washington famously used these budget gimmicks to pass ObamaCare in 2010. Supporters of the massive health care overhaul legislation wanted to trick the American people into believing that it was an inexpensive bill that would reduce the deficit. In order to get a low cost estimate from the Congressional Budget Office, they made it so a significant amount of spending in ObamaCare takes effect after 2020 and is therefore not counted in the ten-year CBO cost projections. These dishonest accounting gimmicks have repeatedly been used to make massive legislation appear less costly. Americans deserve to know exactly how much a bill is going to cost taxpayers. I urge you to contact your senators and urge them to support these two amendments that would stop major accounting gimmicks in Washington. Sincerely, Matt Kibbe President and CEO FreedomWorks [Click here for a PDF version of this letter.] File Attachments SessionsAmendments.pdf128.41 KB

Dear FreedomWorks member, As one of our millions of FreedomWorks members nationwide, I urge you to contact your U.S. Senators and urge them to vote NO on any amendment to the Senate budget that attempts to create a deficit-neutral reserve fund dealing with the collection of state sales and use taxes. The aim of such an amendment is to serve as a proxy vote for an internet sales tax scheme such as the Marketplace Fairness Act. The aforementioned Marketplace Fairness Act is a bill to allow states to collect sales taxes on internet purchases, based on the location of the purchaser of the product. While supporters claim this law would make business fairer for small brick-and-mortar businesses, in reality it would place an impossible burden upon internet sellers (most of which are themselves small businesses), by requiring them to track and enforce the thousands of sales tax laws that exist in the many states. In addition, the Marketplace Fairness Act violates the long-held taxpayer protection that states may only tax individuals who are physically present in that state.  If, in fact, states were to collect an internet sales tax at all, it should certainly be based upon the location on the businesses and not the consumer. But more important than the larger issue of how the proposed internet sales tax works is the fact that such a radical change in accepted practices of taxation needs to be debated openly and at length in committee. Instead, the point of an amendment creating a reserve fund that deals with state sales taxes is that the generic, innocuous language of said amendment is likely to escape the notice of many Senators.  But once passed, the amendment would be used to demonstrate that other bills that dramatically expand state tax authority have enough support to be fast-tracked to the floor. Thus, I urge you to call your U.S. Senators and ask them to vote NO on any amendment allowing a “deficit-neutral reserve fund” dealing with state sales and use taxes. We may count any such vote as a KEY VOTE when calculating the 2013 FreedomWorks Economic Freedom Scorecard, which is used to determine eligibility for the FreedomFighter Award, which recognizes Members of Congress with voting records that support economic freedom. Sincerely, Matt Kibbe President and CEO, FreedomWorks File Attachments KVN_2013-03-20_-_Internet_Sales_Tax_Amendment_-_NO.pdf414.46 KB

Matt Kibbe appeared on Fox News Sunday on March 17 to debate Steve LaTourette, a former Republican Congressman who now leads the Republican Mainstreet Partnership. The debate centered around how the GOP can win elections in the future, and was a classic case of the Tea Party vs. the Establishment.  As host and moderator Chris Wallace stated, "CPAC highlighted the disagreement for the [GOP] to broaden its base." Rep. LaTourette referred several times to Tea Party congressmen as "chuckleheads", and lamented the unwillingness of these representatives to vote yes to offering higher taxes in the Plan B negotiations on the Sequester in December. His point was that Congressional Republicans should have allowed the President to raise taxes on high earners as a negotiation gambit. The theory goes that, had the GOP acquiesced on this point, further negotiations would have yielded bargaining chips from the President that the GOP was seeking, and we could have gotten 60% of what we were looking for. He went so far as to say that these representatives seemed more interested in voting than governing. Kibbe made the case that Congress wouldn't even be debating whether increasing the budget was a good idea if it weren't for the Tea Party wave of 2010, and the continued engagement of the activists to try to get the GOP to hold the line on tax increases. He said, "You have to stop this bipartisan process of kicking the can down the road and creating these artificial crises ... let's stop playing this game. We're never going to fix this problem just by pretending that the process of bipartisanship will get us to real solutions, because that's how we got here." Kibbe went on to remind LaTourette that it wasn't the Tea Party movement or the congresspeople we elected that caused the budget crisis - they came in based on the voters' will to stem the tide of reckless spending. The debate then shifted to Rand Paul's filibuster in the Senate over the nomination of John Brennan to head up the CIA. For many Tea Party activists, this was a seminal moment of protest - a clarion call to be the loyal opposition, much in the same manner that Rick Santelli's original rant sparked the Tea Party movement to life in February 2009. As you'll recall, Sen. Paul's filibuster was chiefly focused on the concept of unmanned drones being used to kill US citizens on US soil if they were suspected of being enemy combatants. Kibbe made the point that you can be strong on national defense while still being fiscally responsible and looking for efficiencies in the Pentagon budget. LaTourette, in response, made reference to 'dysfunction' that didn't allow for negotiations with President Obama over what he called "ham-handed cuts" in the sequestration. The most confusing point LaTourette tried to make was that the reason we don't have a Republican president is that the party can't govern if it doesn't look like the rest of the country. It was hard to follow, but he seemed to be making the point that since most voters are in the middle, we should be more willing to compromise and move to the middle. This, of course, is the classic argument from what is commonly referred to as the Rockefeller Wing of the GOP - those Republicans from the Northeast who would rather compromise with the Left than to take a firm stand against every advance of the Left. Kibbe responded by flatly rejecting the notion that this unwillingness to compromise has narrowed the party. He made the case that FreedomWorks and the Tea Party movement have brought diversity, energy and ideas to the party in the form of actually getting Tea Party candidates elected. These candidates, he contends, have brought many ideas forward to balance the budget, cut taxes and cut spending. It's a compelling argument which harkens back to Jim DeMint's quote from his time as a strong Conservative in the Senate: [DeMint] famously said that he would rather serve in the minority in a small, ideologically conservative Senate Repu

Despite every attempt by congressional Republican leaders to preemptively surrender, the fight to get a sane Continuing Resolution (CR) to fund only the necessary parts of government is not over. Senate Democrats and the White House, not content with victory, are pushing for even more spending and taxes, giving reformers an opportunity. The CR was billed as cementing in place the reductions in the rate of increase in government spending that came from sequestration. At the heart of the problem is that both parties in DC don't believe there is a crisis. The CR funds the agencies implementing Obamcare, and continues spending levels where the panicked Keynesians put them in 2009. The House should vote down the CR when it comes from conference. The press release from the House Committee on Appropriations announced, "Chairman Rogers Introduces Continuing Resolution to Prevent Government Shutdown, Protect National Defense and Veterans." The CR is to "help maintain our national security, and take a potential shutdown off the table",  conceding that a shutdown is not just a danger to be avoided, but is not going to happen. This government needs to be shut down for a few days, weeks, or months, to show the politicians in DC that it really isn't all that important to ordinary Americans.  The president, for his part, continues to maintain that an end to sequestration, another tax increase, and more government spending is the right path. He ridiculed "severe conservatives" seeking to repeal or defund Obamacare, which he sees as settled law. Sequestration is also settled law. Rep John Shimkus (R-IL15) spoke to the Cumberland County, IL Republican Party Lincoln Day dinner on Saturday, March 16. Shimkus is part of his caucus's Steering Committee. He is a team player, voting almost always with leadership. Shimkus asked the crowd if any of them had noticed any effects from sequestration. There was no reply. Many in the crowd appeared not to know what he was talking about. Shimkus described sequestration as inconsequential. "Wasn’t it a shame to have the President running all over the place saying the sky is going to fall. Now you have an understanding of the challenge we have in Washington. Our budget is $3.6 trillion. I can’t even think that big. And we’re fighting over 85 billion? It’d be like 25 cents on $100,000. That’s the perspective. So now you can see it’s tough it is to have this fight but I’m glad we’re doing it." If the sequestration is so inconsequential, and it is, then why is keeping it locked in place more important than defunding Obamacare? That is, since it is so inconsequential, losing it is not much to worry about, and keeping it is not much of a victory.  FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe said of of HR 933 (pdf), This CR will continue to institutionalize the nation’s out-of-control deficits, allowing for over $1.1 trillion in spending through the end of fiscal year 2013. Also, the addition of a number of appropriations bills to the CR, including for the departments of Defense, Commerce, Justice, Homeland Security, and Agriculture, prevents each of those appropriations from being debated and amended individually as ought to be the case, essentially turning this bill into an omnibus spending bill. Rather than allow the fight to defund the unpopular and disastrous Obamacare, House leadership included funding for the agencies that are implementing it and forced a closed rule for the CR, failing even to include a rider emphasizing that a federal health insurance exchange has never been funded. Senate Republicans voted unanimously for of a Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) amendment to defund Obamacare in the Continuing Resolution. But the amendment failed, all Senate Democrats voting against it. Then, 10 Republican Senators voted not to filibuster the CR, showing that their vote to defund Obamacare was just for show. And so it will be, until congressional Minority leaders

FreedomWorks Capitol Hill Update for the Week of March 18th House & Senate Schedule: The House and Senate are both in session this week but will both be going on spring Spring recess beginning Friday. They will reconvene during the week of April 8th. Legislative Highlight of the Week: The House budget written by Paul Ryan (R-WI), H.Con.Res. 25, will likely come to a vote in the house this Wednesday. Meant to balance the budget in 10 years, the bill is the official House budget which will stand in contrast to the Senate budget proposed recently by Senator Patty Murray. The budget will maintain post-sequester levels of spending, offer entitlement reform, repeal ObamaCare, block grant food stamps and Medicaid, and offer fundamental tax reform. The Ryan budget holds revenues at their current level while reducing spending by $80 billion in the first year. Over ten years Ryan expects the plan to save $4.633, though the debt will still rise to over $18.8 trillion by 2024. But the biggest knock against Ryan’s budget is that it essentially balances on the back of Obama’s tax hikes, keeping revenues at current levels. House/Budget: The house Republican Study Committee (RSC) is expected to offer an alternative, conservative budget plan later in the week. The RSC budget will achieve balance in four years, while spending $6.9 trillion less than the CBO’s current projections. The budget also caps discretionary spending to $950 billion until the budget balances in 2017. Defense spending will remain at the same levels as the House Budget Committee proposal.  Debt will be kept a 18.5% of GDP over ten years. The RSC budget does keep the revenue levels generated by the ObamaCare taxes, although like the Ryan budget it does eliminate ObamaCare itself entirely. Continuing Resolution: Today (Tuesday) the Senate will vote on amendments to an amended version of the Continuing Resolution (CR) passed by the house last week, H.R. 933. Senators will be given the opportunity to bring to a vote any amendments to the bill. Once it is past the Senate, the C.R. will return to the House, which will likely pass the amended version before leaving town this Thursday.  FreedomWorks has issued a Key Vote NO on the C.R. in the Senate, and has already scored against poassing the C.R. in the House. Senate/Budget: Democratic Senator Patty Murray has proposed the Senate’s budget, S.Con.Res. 8, which will likely see a vote by the end of the week. The bill only reduces debt to 62.3% of GDP while keeping government spending to 19.8% of GDP by the tenth year.This budget increases taxes by nearly $1 trillion over ten years, and never achieves balance. Senate/Budget Amendments: As part of the budget process, Senators will be allowed to offer any number of amendments that are considered “germane”, which leads to what is popularly called a “vote-a-rama”.  Senators introduce their amendments and are given a minimal amount of time (thirty seconds to a couple of minutes) to pitch their amendment, and then a vote is held. It is expected that several of these amendments will be ones that are worthy of support – stay tuned for more on these later this week.

FreedomWorks has signed onto the following letter supporting Congressman and Chairman of the Republican Study Committee Steve Scalise in his resolution expressing the sense of Congress that a Carbon Tax would be an unacceptable detriment to the U.S. economy. Dear Chairman Scalise, On behalf of the millions of members and supporters of our organizations, we write to commend your introduction of a concurrent resolution expressing the sense of Congress that a carbon tax would be detrimental to the United States economy. A carbon tax would increase energy prices by design, exacerbating pain at the pump and raising theprice of electricity and home heating fuels. The poorest Americans would be hit the hardest because they spend the largest share of their income on energy. According to a recent study by the National Association of Manufacturers, under a popular carbon tax proposal output could drop by as much as 15 percent in energy-intensive sectors and 7.7 percent in non-energy intensive sectors, destroying millions of jobs. Moreover, a carbon tax would be a new broad-based source of revenue to enable excessive federal spending. The income tax has never yielded more than 20 percent of gross domestic product in total federal revenue. A carbon tax would, like a value-added tax, enable a permanent increase in the size of the federal government. While the White House publicly denies plans to propose a carbon tax, there are thousands of internal Treasury Department documents discussing the issue that the administration refuses to release to the public. The chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee recently introduced carbon tax legislation, and there have been persistent rumors that such a tax could be included in a secretly negotiated deficit-reduction package. Under these circumstances, it is critical for the House to take a clear and unequivocal stand that it understands how economically destructive a carbon tax would be. We therefore commend your resolution and urge your colleagues to support and pass it expeditiously. Sincerely, 60 Plus Association - American Commitment - American Energy Alliance Americans for Limited Government - Americans for Prosperity - Americans for Tax Reform - Caesar Rodney Institute - Competitive Enterprise Institute - FreedomWorks - Freedom Action - Frontiers of Freedom - George C. Marshall Institute - Heartland Institute - Heritage Action - National Center for Policy Analysis - Taxpayers Protection Alliance File Attachments CL_2013-03-14_-_Scalise_Carbon_Tax_Resolution.pdf1.84 MB

Dear FreedomWorks member, As one of our millions of FreedomWorks members nationwide, I urge you to contact your Representative and urge him or her to support the resolution, H.Con.Res. 24, by Rep. Steve Scalise, expressing the sense of Congress that a carbon tax would be harmful to the U.S. economy. The carbon tax is essentially a tax on all emissions from burning fossil fuels – which provide over 80 percent of our nation’s energy.  Taxing carbon emissions will necessarily cause the cost of our nation’s most plentiful energy source to increase sharply, placing addition burdens upon both individual Americans and our economy at large. Even some proponents of carbon tax schemes admit that their plans will cost thousands of jobs in the energy sector. Increasing the cost of energy is one of the most devastating blows that can be dealt to a struggling economy, because doing so increases the costs of all goods through increased transportation costs and overhead.  Also, higher energy costs are inherently regressive, taking a far greater portion of income from the poor. In addition, a carbon tax would add a massive, brand new revenue source for the federal government, which would inevitably be spent to continue the growth of the leviathan state. Thus, I urge you to contact your Representative and urge him or her to reject a carbon tax by supporting Rep. Scalise’s resolution. Sincerely,   Matt Kibbe President and CEO FreedomWorks File Attachments LoS_2013-03-12_-_Support_-_Scalise_Carbon_Tax_Resolution.pdf184.63 KB

The recent news cycle has been dominated with concern over the US Government's budget process: the debt, deficits, sequestration, and the continuing failure of the Senate to pass a budget in over 4 years. This FreedomWorks Issue Analysis is a brief history of budget reform in America. Clues how to solve the budgetary crisis of today and those of the future may very well be contained in the lessons of the past. Check out this FreedomWorks Issue Analysis and click here to learn more: Creativity versus Conviction: A Brief History of Federal Budget Reform File Attachments Budget_Reform_Issue_Analysis.pdf629.91 KB

Capitol Hill Update, March 11-15, 2013 House & Senate Schedule: The House and Senate are both in session today, and will remain in D.C. for the next two weeks. Both bodies will go on Spring recess for two weeks beginning the 22nd of March. Legislative Highlight of the Week: The Continuing Resolution (CR), H.R. 933, will come to a vote sometime this week in the Senate. The House passed its own $982 billion CR late last week (including emergency spending it comes to over $1.1 trillion). The Senate version of the bill is thought to be at the same funding level as the House bill but with several departments’ appropriations included. The current CR will expire on March 27th, and this new CR would continue funding the federal government through the end of the 2013 fiscal year, September 30th. Senate/Health Care: Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mike Lee (R-UT) have proposed an amendment to the aforementioned Continuing Resolution which would delay funding the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) until the economy returns to an average level of growth.  Effectively, this would stop the implementation of ObamaCare for the foreseeable future.  FreedomWorks will be scoring any vote on this amendment on our Congressional Scorecard (you can read the Key Vote notice HERE). Senate/Budget: On Wednesday and Thursday the Senate Budget Committee will mark up its budget for fiscal year 2014. If the budget is actually passed it would be the first time in nearly 4 years the Senate has bothered to do so. For over 1400 days the Senate has refused to pass a budget as required by law. While the details of this budget have yet to be released, talk on the Hill is that the Democratic budget proposal may contain a massive tax increase, and will not be a serious balanced budget. House/Budget: On Wednesday, the House Budget Committee is also marking up its own budget for the 2014 fiscal year. Members are set to vote upon a budget resolution next week. The budget will likely be a slightly modified version of the Ryan budgets of the past two years, except that this one will actually balance the budget in ten years – a notable improvement.  More details on that plan should be available Tuesday. House/Welfare: This Wednesday, the House will vote on the “Preserving Work Requirements for Welfare Programs Act of 2013,” H.R. 890.  Last year, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a letter declaring that states could opt out of the requirement that welfare recipients must have a job in order to receive welfare payments.  The work requirement was a key component of the crucial welfare reform of 1996, and this bill would simply overrule HHS and reinstate that requirement. House/Job Training: On Thursday and Friday, the House will consider the “Supporting Knowledge and Investing in Lifelong Skills (SKILLS) Act,” H.R. 803, introduced by Rep. Virginia Foxx (NC-5). The bill would streamline the wasteful network of federal job training programs and give states more control over how the money for these programs is spent. Currently there are over forty unique job training programs scattered across the agencies of the federal government, and most of them overlap to some extent, wasting untold amounts of taxpayers’ dollars. FreedomWorks has issued a letter in support of the SKILLS Act, which you can read HERE. House/Right to Work: Representative Steve King (IA-4) has introduced the National Right to Work Act, H.R. 946, which would allow workers the freedom to choose whether they wish to join a union, and would disallow compulsory union dues. More than 8 million Americans in 24 states currently work in shops where they have no choice but to join their union, whether they agree with how that union represents them or not. You can read FreedomWorks’ Letter in Support of H.R. 946, HERE.

Dear FreedomWorks member, As one of our millions of FreedomWorks members nationwide, I urge you to contact your Representative and urge him or her to co-sponsor H.R. 946, the National Right-to-Work Act.  Introduced by Rep. Steve King (IA-4), this legislation would allow workers the freedom to choose whether they wish to join a union, and would disallow the practice of compulsory union dues. The 1935 National Labor Relations Act was passed to secure the right of unions to collectively bargain with employers.  However, the act also secured the right of unionized workforces to run union-exclusive shops. Currently, federal labor law essentially allows unions to run closed shops, meaning that any new employee joining a unionized workforce can be forced to join that union and pay dues as a condition of employment. States can choose to opt out of this federal arrangement, but heavily unionized states struggle to pass right-to-work legislation against the efforts of unions which use their compulsory dues to finance massive political campaigns.  Thus, 8 million Americans in 24 states currently work in shops where they have no choice but to join their union, whether they agree with how that union represents them or not. The National Right-to-Work Act would simply do away with the specific provision of labor law that allows this union coercion.  The millions of workers in mandatory union shops would regain their freedom to choose not to associate with a union, while still retaining their right to unionize and collectively bargain if they choose to do so. I urge you to contact your Representative and urge him or her to protect workplace freedom by co-sponsoring the National Right-to-Work Act, H.R. 946. Sincerely,   Matt Kibbe President and CEO FreedomWorks File Attachments LoS_2013-03-10_-_Support_-_National_Right-to-Work_House.pdf309.64 KB

Dear FreedomWorks member, As one of our millions of FreedomWorks members nationwide, I urge you to contact your Representative and urge him or her to support the “Supporting Knowledge and Investing in Lifelong Skills (SKILLS) Act”, H.R. 803.  Introduced by Rep. Virginia Foxx (NC-5), the bill would streamline the wasteful network of federal job training programs and give states more control over how the money for these programs is spent. Currently, there are over forty unique job training programs scattered across the agencies of the federal government, and most of them overlap to some extent, wasting untold amounts of taxpayers’ dollars in the bureaucracy.  The SKILLS act seeks to put that money to use more efficiently by combining 35 of these federal agencies and allowing states more control over the allocation of those funds and programs. Although the ideal solution would be to keep the federal government out of the realm of employment and job training altogether, reducing waste and duplication in the government is always an improvement.  More importantly, states will always have the better knowledge of the needs of their populations, so giving them more control over programs that affect their citizens is bound to be an improvement upon the operations of a distant federal bureaucracy. I urge you to contact your Representative and ask him or her to support H.R. 803, the SKILLS Act, today. Sincerely,   Matt Kibbe President and CEO FreedomWorks File Attachments LoS_2013-03-07_-_Support_-_SKILLS_Act.pdf193.74 KB

In an article released yesterday, I demonstrated the absurdity of the White House’s claims regarding the impact of sequestration on lines at the airport. Today, I continue this analysis by examining the budget for the United States Secret Service. One of the most visible impacts we are seeing from sequestration comes from the White House’s announcement that beginning March 9th, they will cease offering tours to the public.Although the Washington Monument is usually the first casualty from budget fights, the fact that it has already been closed since it was rocked by an unusual East coast earthquake in 2011 means that the Administration has to look elsewhere to make its point. And never mind that the White House is funded by taxpayers, who have a right to see where there money is going. It is one thing to appropriate the hard earned money of workers in order to maintain government buildings, but it is quite another to then deny those same people access to to the fruits of their taxes. It is certainly an undemocratic move to make, but the White House is blaming cuts in the budget for the Secret Service, claiming that they don’t have the staff to effectively manage protection for tours. Once more, however, an actual examination of the budget numbers reveals that these excuses do not stand up to scrutiny. The budget request for the Secret Service in 2013 was $1.601 billion dollars, whereas their funding in 2008 was a mere $1.385 billion, which becomes $1.481 billion when adjusted for inflation. The amount of money cut from this budget under the sequestration process has been reported to be just $85 million dollars, leaving the Secret Service with fully $35 million dollars more in 2013 than they had in 2008. Additionally, Secret Service employment has increased along with the budget, indicating that they are more able to carry out their duties now than they were five years ago. In 2008, Secret Service employment totalled 6,496 persons. Although they do not list a precise employment figure in their latest annual report, the agency puts the number at “more than 6,500.” For all we know, this could mean considerably more, and it is unclear why so small a cutback should have such visible consequences unless it is to intentionally give the impression that things are worse than they really are. In an effort to justify the tour cancellations, the White house reported today that the tours cost the Secret Service $74,000 a week, but this only further hurts their case. A little simple arithmetic reveals that this cost amounts to just over $3.8 million a year, barely ten percent of the budget increases seen by the Secret Service in the past five years, even after the sequestration cuts. The cancellation of White House tours is a petty political move intended to anger citizens who would like nothing more to view the most famous house in the country, paid for by their own tax dollars. There is no legitimate reason why the Secret Service, which had no problem administering tours in 2008, can now be unable to do so given more funding and more employees. The longer this conversation goes on, the more obvious it becomes that the claims made by the White House are nothing more than scare tactics designed to inconvenience Americans and demonize political opponents.

Of the extensive parade of horribles the White House has been insisting will occur as a result of the sequestration cuts in early March, impediments to Americans’ ability to travel are among the most ridiculous. Not to say that these things won’t happen - secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano is already reporting that airport lines have nearly doubled - but they are in fact the result of political game playing in order to make Republicans look bad by enacting highly visible reductions in services, rather than the necessary consequences of imaginary cuts. The Obama Administration has warned that a $600 million dollar reduction in the budget of the Federal Aviation Administration is dangerous and foolish, but as usual when the Administration talks about cuts they are really referring to reductions in planned increases in spending. In fact, the FAA only requested a budget of $15.172 billion for fiscal year 2013. After the $600 million dollar “reduction,” the amount they actually received was $15.999 billion. This is not what most Americans have in mind when the media is portraying spending cuts as being draconian and austere. But maybe the demands on the FAA have increased in recent years and they need the extra cash to keep up with the modern business of air travel. Well, the facts do not really bear this out. If we examine the budget for the FAA in fiscal year 2008, we can see that they only received $14.077 billion in that year, which adjusted for inflation comes out to $15.056 billion in today’s dollars. That’s almost a billion dollars less than the FAA received this year, and yet the amount of air travel in 2008 was significantly heavier than it is today. The average monthly number of scheduled domestic passenger flights in 2008 was 54,309. By 2012, that number had fallen to just 53,730. So the bottom line is that we are looking at an agency being given a billion dollars more to manage nearly 6,000 fewer flights a year, and yet we are expected to believe that longer lines and more delays are unavoidable. It is clear what is going on here. In the light of the leaked email from the Department of Agriculture stating “however you manage the reduction, you need to make sure that it does not contradict what we said the impact would be,” it is obvious that there is a deliberate effort being made to inconvenience Americans purely for the sake of the budget fight in Washington. It is shameful and childish for the administration to use these scare tactics to manipulate the American people, when they should be focussed on the business of governing and finding real solutions to the country’s fiscal problems. In the end it won’t matter which party gets the blame if we are unable to prevent the nation from sliding into bankruptcy. It’s time to put a stop to the hyperbole and fear-mongering over what amounts to a barely one percent budget impact of the sequester. If this is the amount of hysteria we see over so small a change, how can we ever expect to make the meaningful reforms necessary to our continued growth and prosperity?