Three
years ago, Admiral Mike Mullen sounded the alarm for our nation with
this chilling warning: "Our national debt is our biggest national
security threat."
That
was three years ago, when our debt stood at $13 ½ trillion. Today, we
owe $16 ½ trillion. In other words, since he issued that warning, we
have added more to this country’s debt than we did in our nation’s first
200 years.
No
nation has ever taxed and borrowed and spent its way to prosperity, but
many nations have taxed and borrowed and spent their way to economic
ruin and bankruptcy and history is screaming this warning at us: Nations
that bankrupt themselves aren’t around very long, because before you
can provide for the common defense you have to be able to pay for it,
and the ability of our nation to do so is coming into grave question.
Just
in the first four weeks of this year, Congress added more than a third
of a trillion dollars of new spending to this crushing burden.
The
fiscal cliff deal added $300 billion of new spending and the Hurricane
Sandy bill added another $50 billion – more than 90 percent of which had
nothing to do with emergency relief for storm victims. Earlier this
month, Congress simply did away with the debt limit altogether until
mid-May.
Two
years ago, Congress passed the so-called “The Budget Control Act” that
authorized the biggest single expansion of debt in our nation’s history.
But
Congress also agreed to reduce the projected deficit by $1.2 trillion
over the next ten years – either by a super-committee or, failing that,
through an automatic budget reduction called the “sequester.”
The
sequester doesn’t actually cut spending in any conventional sense of
the word. After a decade in which spending has grown 64 percent – or
nearly twice the rate of inflation and population combined -- the
sequester merely limits the increase next year to one half of one
percent.
I
opposed that Act in part because its sequester was less than 1/3 of
what officials at Standard and Poors warned was the minimum necessary
deficit reduction to preserve our nation’s triple-A credit rating. I
also objected to across-the-board cuts – that treat our highest priority
the same as our lowest – and the disproportionate impact it would have
on our defense budget.
These warnings fell on deaf ears at the time.
But
since then, twice the House has tried to address this mistake with
legislation to replace the worst of the defense cuts with long-term
entitlement reform. That’s ultimately the only way to bring our fiscal
crisis and its spiraling debt under control.
Both
died in the Senate, and after the November election, the likelihood of
any entitlement reform over the next several years is exceedingly
remote.
Which means that however imperfect the
sequester may be, it is at this moment in our history, the ONLY tool
currently available to us to BEGIN to point our nation back toward
fiscal solvency and away from the perilous fiscal path that we are now
on.
We need to give administrators – especially
the military command – the flexibility to set priorities and manage our
money accordingly. But the overall sequester reductions must be
maintained.
A few months ago, the chief of
sovereign debt for Standard and Poors made this point: that although the
sequester was insufficient to justify maintaining a triple-A credit
rating, it was at least a step in the right direction. He said, “the
sequester was an agreement that Congress made with itself, and we would
view any step back from that agreement very negatively.”
When
the history of our era is written, let it not be said that ours was a
generation of locusts that consumed not only the wealth we inherited
from our fathers and mothers, but also stripped bare the futures of our
sons and daughters.
