Senate Budget Committee - All Talk, No Action

As Jordan discussed yesterday, there is nearly universal agreement in Washington that our current fiscal situation is nothing short of a crisis – of biblical proportions.

Senators Jim DeMint and Olympia Snowe (somewhat surprising allies) claim that fiscal calamity is jeopardizing our standard of living and undermining our national security.

President Obama says that another financial crisis is looming if the full faith and credit of the United States is jeopardized.

But while those of all political stripes verbally acknowledge that we've reached a critical juncture for restoring our fiscal stability, it's abundantly clear that at least some of those most responsible for charting a path to recovery are all talk and no action.

Senator Kent Conrad (D-ND) is currently hawking a plan to cut into the deficit by using equal shares of tax increases and spending cuts. Leaving aside for now the debate over whether or not tax increases should be a part of the equation, it is rather astonishing that Senator Conrad feels he has any moral ground from which to advocate his preferred solution.

As Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Senator Conrad is chiefly responsible for crafting the Senate budget, which in theory serves as the starting point for the annual spending process. There's one problem: today marks the 800th day since the Senate last passed a budget.

Yes, you read that correctly. Despite a responsibility to pass a annual budget (with a regular deadline of April 15, for what it's worth), Senator Conrad and the Senate Budget Committee have gone more than two years without even approving the basic framework of a budget. The most logical explanation for this failure is that the current situation demands a budget with deep spending cuts and genuine reforms – a budget that Senator Conrad is simply unwilling to put forward. His current idea of using massive tax increases to solve the problem, while we continue to send hundreds of millions of dollars to groups like Planned Parenthood and the terrorist-led Palestinian Authority, lends even more weight to this assumption.

However, regardless of motivation, the fact remains that the Senate Budget Committee deserves significant blame for failing to perform its most basic moral obligation to our children and grandchildren. This failure came at a time when the United States was careening off the fiscal tracks. So until Senator Conrad can demonstrate that he is again taking his job seriously by passing a budget, it seems logical that one of the first cuts in the federal budget should be the funding for the Senate Budget Committee.

This is another example of the moral failure of our government's spending habits and the failings associated with deficit spending that Jordan laid out. God has called us individually to be stewards of what we have been given; similarly, elected officials are required to be stewards of the taxpayer’s money. Not creating a budget and living within that budget demonstrates an attitude that is lacking of discipline and principle. And choosing to take more money to compensate for that lack of discipline, frankly, is immoral.