February 11, 2010

Blue Dogs push for tighter reins on budget

By Mike Hasten  |  Monroe News-Star  |  Link to article

BATON ROUGE — When Congress resumes Blue Dog Democrats will be pushing the House leadership and President Barack Obama to take a bigger bite out of the deficit and put spending on a shorter leash.

U.S. Rep Charlie Melancon said Thursday that the conservative arm of the Democratic Party is pushing a plan to impose bigger spending cuts and freeze more of the budget than the president proposes.

“We agree with the president about cuts and freezing the budget,” he said, “but $250 billion savings over 10 years? We’ve got to do more than that.”

To get what they want, the Blue Dogs’ effort will be challenging Obama and the House leadership. The 54-member-group has enough votes to block any budget resolution, so it is a force to be reckoned with in budget negotiations.

The first step toward bringing spending into line was approval of “pay-go” — pay as you go — which would limit spending, Melancon said. That practice was in place during the President Bill Clinton years and resulted in federal surpluses that disappeared when Republicans took control of the White House and Congress “and started spending like drunken sailors,” Melancon said.

Blue Dogs want to work with liberal members of the Democratic Party and with Republicans to “get this fiscal monster back in the yard,” he said, but he’s surprised at the number of supposedly conservative Republicans who are objecting to the proposal.

“Republicans didn’t want pay-go,” he said. “They’d rather give tax cuts to the wealthy. If you’re a wealthy person, you’re already paying a lower percentage of your income in taxes.”

Besides budget cuts and freezing expenditures, “we need a balanced budget amendment,” he said, but that will have to come after the government gets spending under control.

A major reason that the budget deficit looks so huge, Melancon said, is that under the Bush administration the cost of the war on terrorism was outside the budget.

“Now we’re showing the real cost of running the government,” he said. “It’s not pretty.”