New GOP Conference Video - "Behind Closed Doors"

Cantor on the White House's battle with the media

House Republican Whip Eric Cantor appears today in National Review Online on the White House's battle with media organizations.

Debt and Deficits by the Numbers

Reposted from the House GOP Conference:

Almost one-year after Barack Obama was elected President and three years since Democrats took majorities in Congress, the Department of Treasury reports that under the Democrats’ control, 2009 was the worst fiscal year in the nation’s entire history. Democrats have abandoned their lofty promises to voters and continued their pattern of reckless spending and government expansion. The results have been historically disastrous.

INCREASED DEFICIT

$1.417 Trillion: The FY 2009 federal deficit, the highest amount ever and three times last year’s record-setting deficit of $458 billion.

10%: The 2009 deficit as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the highest since 1945, the last year of World War II. Since 1946, the deficit as a percentage of GDP had never topped 6 percent.

$9.050 Trillion: The combined amount of deficits the White House predicts over the next ten years under the President’s budget.

$739 Billion: The smallest annual deficit over the next ten years under the President’s budget.

INCREASED DEBT

$11.952 Trillion: The current national debt, including Treasury securities held by the government.

$38,840: The amount of the national debt owed by each man, woman, and child in the U.S.

$104,094: The share of the national debt owed by every household in the U.S.

$3.282 Trillion: The amount the national debt has increased since Democrats took control of Congress on January 4, 2007.

$1.325 Trillion: The amount the national debt has increased since President Obama was inaugurated just nine months ago, on January 20, 2009.

$199 Billion: The amount of money spent by the government to pay the interest on its debts in 2009.

$12.104 Trillion: The current limit on national debt, which was raised from $11.315 trillion for the “stimulus” bill and which Democrats now say must be raised yet again soon.

$24.498 Trillion: The total national debt in 2019 under the President’s budget, according to White House estimates.

Morning Must Reads

Wall Street Journal: Signs of recovery don't extend to jobs

NY Post: Cost of healthcare bill soars

The Hill: "Doc fix" collapses

The Hill: Obama takes partisan tone

Roll Call: Leaders confident on healthcare vote

Wall Street Journal Editorial Board:

“Temporary Beltway Sanity” (The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board)

Yesterday saw some rare good news on the health-care front, with the stealth Democratic plan to move $247 billion in ObamaCare costs off the books collapsing in the Senate on a procedural vote of 47 to 53. Maybe there's more anxiety among Democrats about a huge permanent increase in government health spending than the White House is willing to let on.

A dozen Democrats (plus independent Joe Lieberman) voted against Majority Leader Harry Reid's gambit, which would have superseded automatic cuts in Medicare payments to doctors scheduled for 21% next year and higher after that. Democrats had included this fix as part of "comprehensive" reform but that pushed costs too high, while President Obama is insisting on a bill that doesn't increase the deficit on paper.

So Mr. Reid's inspiration was to decouple these payments from ObamaCare as stand-alone legislation, while hoping everyone ignored the phony budget math. The media did mostly ignore this subterfuge. But enough Republicans developed enough backbone that they spooked Democrats like North Dakota's Kent Conrad, who for once stood by their supposed deficit-hawk convictions. Notwithstanding the anesthetizing effect of Congress's now-routine trillion-dollar cost estimates, more than a few Democrats are still capable of sticker shock.

Mr. Reid said yesterday that he expects the Senate to "pick this up again" after it dispenses with ObamaCare, perhaps by correcting the doctor-payment formula for only two years at a cost of $24 billion. No doubt that too would be deficit-financed, though the new problem is that Democrats wouldn't be meeting the American Medical Association's price for backing ObamaCare.

The doctors lobby said in a statement that it was "deeply disappointed" by the vote, and that "Congress created the Medicare physician payment system, and Congress needs to fix this problem once and for all." If the AMA has any sense at all they'll see that they're being played for fools. (We recognize that this is a rhetorical "if.")

As for the Democrats who are worried about spending, or claim to be worried, we trust they understand that the entire premise of ObamaCare rests on automatic future spending cuts like the doctor payments that will never happen in practice, among other budget gimmicks. If they can't eat a mere $247 billion, then they shouldn't eat ObamaCare's other future trillions.

Shuster meets with diplomatic delegation from Georgia

Today, Congressman Shuster met with David Bakradze, Speaker of the Parliament of Georgia and Batu Kutelia, Ambassador of Georgia in the U.S. to discuss current affairs and the strategic relationship between Georgia and the United States. Shuster, who serves as the co-chair of the House Georgia Caucus was joined by Melissa Cox Bosse, Shuster's military affairs aide; Misha Darchiashvili, Senior Counselor, Embassy of Georgia; Paata Davitaia, Vice-Speaker of the Parliament of Georgia (United Opposition; Levan Vepkhvadze, Vice-Speaker of the Georgian Parliament (Christian Democratic Party); and Nick Revazishvili, Counselor of the Embassy.

What is happening at the House Oversight and Reform Committee?

From the Republican press office at the Oversight and Reform Committee:

Facing a Republican demand for a vote on subpoenaing Bank of America for the records of the Countrywide VIP program, the Oversight and Government Committee Majority today met in private for more than thirty minutes and decided to abandon a scheduled 2 p.m. committee mark-up at 2:35 pm without appearing on the dais to formally convened the meeting. Republican members were forced to sit in the hearing room while Democrats mulled to position. While the Majority cited a conflict with a Financial Services Committee meeting for the after-the-fact cancellation explanation, numerous Democrats, including those on the Financial Services Committee, were captured on video leaving the Oversight Committee meeting space after the cancellation.

Worse, still it looks like the Chairmen actually ordered that the locks be changed the on the committee room door to punish Republican members for taping the hearing with a video camera, according to this article in The Hill.

The importance of small business in job growth

A great post about small business job creation over at the GOP Leader blog by Kevin Boland. Read it here, but first, here's a small part of the original post:

House Republicans recognize that the engine of job creation in America is small business, not government. That’s why two weeks ago, House Republicans sent President Obama and Speaker Pelosi a letter outlining six better solutions to create jobs:

• Allow small businesses to take a tax deduction equal to 20 percent of their income.
• Let small businesses join together to purchase health insurance for their workers the way large businesses and labor unions do.
• Enact genuine legal reform and policies that incentivize wellness to reduce health care costs for small businesses.
• Lower taxes for all taxpayers by reducing the current 15 percent rate to 10 percent and reducing the current 10 percent rate to 5 percent.
• Expand health savings accounts (HSAs) to provide additional flexibility to small businesses in providing health care to their employees.
• Increase the net operating loss carry back from 2 to 5 years to provide struggling employers with additional resources to keep their doors open.

Speaker Pelosi’s $1 trillion “stimulus” clearly isn’t working - and Democrats’ plans to tax entrepreneurs isn’t encouraging small businesses to create jobs. Government is by definition a bureaucratic and wasteful institution - it doesn’t possess the innovation and risk taking that exists in the private sector, which, when unleashed to its fullest potential, results in expanding businesses and new job creation.