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I noted with interest the views of Green Mountain Daily contributors regarding a letter I recently signed to the so-called congressional Super Committee, which is charged with getting the federal debt under control. I signed this letter because I am working hard to preserve vital human service programs and rebuild our struggling economy.
Specifically, I signed it for three reasons:
1) Those of us concerned about ensuring economic security and maintaining vital human services programs need to step into the fray as the committee seeks consensus. A failure to do so will lead to decisions made about the future of Medicare and other important programs without progressive voices offering alternatives. My view is one shared by Nancy Pelosi and other leading progressive voices in Congress like Peter DeFazio, Emmanuel Cleaver, and Jared Polis.
For example, rather than cutting Medicare benefits, we should be urging the committee to adopt reforms that will make Medicare sustainable for current recipients and future generations. We should empower the federal government to negotiate with big pharmaceutical companies over the price of Medicare prescription drugs. Right now, due to a deal the Tom Delay Congress struck with Pharma, the federal government is explicitly forbidden from using its bulk purchasing power to get a better deal for seniors and taxpayers. Doing so would save $160 billion over the next 10 years. We should also root out widespread Medicare fraud by assigning a U.S. attorney to every congressional district to stop unscrupulous actors in the health care industry from taking advantage of seniors to illegally line their pockets. Finally, we should adopt a more sustainable provider payment system pioneered by Vermont that rewards health care providers for good health outcomes rather than for the number procedures they can perform.
2) The letter calls for the committee to take a balanced approach that includes sacrifice from those who can most afford it. Allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire would save $4 trillion over ten years. Freeing themselves from the handcuffs of the Grover Norquist anti-tax pledge, 40 Republicans signed this letter in the face of rabid Tea Party opposition. That is a gutsy move that I hope will lead to far less pressure to slash vital human services programs.
3) A failure of the Super Committee to reach agreement by November 23 will trigger automatic and indiscriminate across-the-board cuts in the very programs we have fought to create and fund over the years, including education, child care, child nutrition, health care, and the environment. That is an unacceptable outcome.
While I can't predict the outcome of this debate, I am certain of two things: 1) the debt problem facing this country is real and a threat to the job security and prosperity of every American, and 2) as Vermont's sole representative in the House, it is my job in this debate to try to preserve programs important to vulnerable Vermonters, ensure that those who can afford to contribute to a solution do so, and create good jobs for working Americans.
Peter Welch
While I approve of your signature of the letter, I have to say that as a voter I am horrendously disappointed you would choose to respond to such a website. Those who promulgate and run this site are driven by hate and extremism. They degrade and dehumanize other Vermonters based solely on the degree to which they support the same political agenda. You have chosen to respond to a prod from a hate driven group. For that, you owe an apology for your constituents who don’t support the same narrow, dogmatic and unthinking agenda.
Almost every blog has an agenda. Some proclaim to be non-partisan, but reading the posts on them quickly says otherwise. Vermont blogs are no different. To suggest that this blog is more hateful or hurtful than others is simply not true. Depending on one’s viewpoint they are all less than helpful. Yet, I would agree that this blog could clean up its language from time to time.
Thanks for taking the time and making an effort to explain your position regarding the “Super Committee” to GMD.
However, I take issue with several of your responses (or lack of one, specifically regarding war).
First, where is the voting record that shows Republicans have let the Bush/Obama tax cuts expire? Or passed any progressive based taxes? Or ended oil-subsidies? There is none, plain and simple. To believe that they will do so this time is simply crazy. So getting 40 Republicans to sign the letter is akin to Lucy setting up the football once again.
Second, if the Super Committee fails, the triggered cuts would still require voting by both the House and the Senate. Neither body is obligated to pass those cuts.
Third, why didn’t you call for an immediate end to the war in Afghanistan? The American public does not want to keep spending money on a foolish crusade. It’s time to end the war, bring our troops home, and return our defense budget to the level it was at prior to September 2001.
I’m not convinced that the debt problem is as dire as you make it out to be, and I have strong suspicions that it’s been contrived in order to support an austerity agenda.
I understand where you’re coming from, but I’d personally like to see evidence to support the claim that “the debt problem facing this country is real.” The primary threat I, personally, see to our prosperity is not the debt but instead the republicans who are hyping it as an issue.
Don’t you think it possible that your own support for the notion that the debt issue is a “real” one is helping to enable this behavior on their part?
Thank you for taking this opportunity to engage with some of your concerned constituents.
I can’t say that I’m in agreement with your position, but I respect that you feel it is the only position you can take under the circumstances. Yes, the debt problem is real; no one is doubting that.
However, rather like the Social Security “crisis,” the urgency to quickly eliminate the debt has been conveniently manufactured as a road-block to progressive reform by the Party of the Privileged.
But it is no more real than it has been for a number of years now; and despite this fact, we have pursued several, possibly unwinnable, wars in the middle-east, while at the same time easing the tax burdens of the rich. The “urgency” of the debt situation seems to be more a function of who is in charge than it is based in rock solid reality.
If we have come to such a state of emergency with regard to national finances, don’t you find it conspicuously odd that, over the same period during which we have come to this precipice, the top 1% of earners in this country have gotten exponentially richer?
Could it be, that contrary to the Republican truism, bestowing tax relief on the rich does not in fact create jobs, but only serves to reinforce the opportunity gulf that separates the rich from the poor? Does it not therefore make some sense to try the opposite approach?
I know you’re between a rock and a hard place over there in Congress, but there’s another expression that the Republicans hold dear to their hearts, and you would do well to take as your own: Give ’em an inch and they’ll take a mile.
Just on the odd chance you are unaware: this site selects for a paticular viewpoint. It may be due to the members’ inability to accept alternative viewpoint, or it may be due to the questionable intellectual rigor of those who particpate. Either way, there are any number of comments you are not seeing.
I appreciate your willingness to reach out to Cat Food Commission II. However, we both know this is not the only letter that could have been written. The preemptive agreement to sign off on unnecessary austerity measures strikes me as short-sighted and cruel.
We are talking about cuts that will have serious detrimental effects on elderly, disabled, and low-income people. The bottom of the economic pyramid has been devastated to the point that they have nothing more to give – anything more taken from them will have dire results in terms of their health and well-being.
The letter may have requests for an inconsequential bone or two to be thrown to the masses, but overall it says the signatories are a-ok with cuts that will throw people like my 81-year-old retired, disabled, Korean war veteran father onto the street.
I am dismayed that causing such severe harm to good people is even under consideration, never mind supported … as long as the commission gives it cover by adding some token, insubstantial tax increase upon those who won’t even notice the difference.
The bill that created the commission, with its poison-pill provisions was an idiotic means of kicking the economic can down the road, while attempting to create a smoke screen that would allow people (like the 60 democrats who signed this letter) to cry “but, but, arbitrary cuts!” when the new deadline approached.
Americans had a short attention span, but with the advent of social media, we can now keep one another informed despite the old-school media’s attempts to feed recent history into the memory hole. As our neighbors to the north would say, “Je me souviens.”
We are tired of being sacrificial lambs, and we aren’t happy with those who offer to lead us to a slightly more humane slaughter. We’ll still be slaughtered in the end.
Rep. Welch,
Here’s where you stretch your justifications too far for credibility:
Um, no, the letter does not do that. Specifically it does not specify that those who sacrifice will be those who can most afford it. Instead the letter repeats the mantra that
I agree with others who suggest that the debt “problem” has been manufactured as camouflage for the Republican extremist goal of destroying the social safety net. Your signature on this letter shows that you and 59 other Democrats, many of them “blue dogs,” are more than willing to throw those of us in the lower echelons of the 99 percent under the bus in order to get some pat on the head or kick in the behind from a House majority that won’t pass a tax bill, regardless of whose committee it comes from.
Thinking that getting 40 Republicans to sign this letter means compromise is possible is at best naive, at worst irresponsible and masochistic.
We can both hope I’m wrong. But we both know that the GOP in Congress is determined to have everything their way. In the meantime, who is standing up for us in Congress? The Democrats who signed this letter just signed away that role and sacrificed our trust.
NanuqFC
We now know that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob. ~ FDR
Many people do question the debt crisis. Funny it was none existent while the Republican’s were in office. Many good economists like Paul Krugman, Dean Baker, JK Gailbraith and others have shown that spending now is far more important. But Congressman Welch has drunk the Pete Petersen Kool-Aid that says Social Security and Medicare and the poorest must suffer to keep the rich from rising taxes. This consensus is formed in DC by the rich and for the rich and our congress critters are told to carry it out or else.
Our Democratic President is working desperately to keep the banks from being prosecuted for their massive and continuing fraud. In addition to being anti-democratic, the Stupor Committee are zombies for the rich imposing their BS on those who can least afford to bear the pain. And there is no shared sacrifice in this, It is all being put on the backs of the old the poor, the disabled and the working and middle class. The rich, as we see in chart after chart, are doing spectacularly well and they want to keep it that way no matter how many folks lose their houses, their healthcare, their sanity or their lives.
The simple reason is those constituencies don’t have the millions of dollars the lobbyists for the banks have, so they can be tossed aside. We are supposed to be sympathetic to the argument that our reps like Welch can’t get elected without that cash. Maybe that is true but it does the average American no good. It is simply a plea for the career of a Congressman to matter more than the welfare of the majority of the people. We need to be done with these non representatives of the will of the people. Polls show the people, overwhelmingly, want to see the rich taxed and the wars ended. The citizenry understands what Occupy Wall Street is making clear to everyone but our elites. Its a comfy cash rich environment for those who go along with the bankers and Pete Petersen’s agenda but it is grim and undeserved punishment for regular folks. Yet it was the rich and the elites who crashed the economy with their fraud and gambling
There is no question that we have a huge national debt, and that it is not sustainable in the long term.
There is also no question that in the immediate term the only feasible way to make any progress on the debt is to get the economy working again. Jobs, money in circulation, more tax revenues.
It doesn’t do anyone any good to pretend that the debt is a made-up issue. You can try pushing that line if you want, but anyone who claims that there is no difference between our congressional delegation and any imaginable congressional delegation composed of Republicans is out of touch with reality.
So nice to see you back. I was worried something might have happened to you. There are a lot of ‘extremists’ walking the streets these days. In fact, more and more, you see these ‘extremists’ actually living on the streets. And the elderly and disabled have canes and crutches. I would suggest you not verbalize to these folks the things you imply in your above comments, lest you create a situation where the Steel Hankie, like the taser, will not be applicable as an appropriate devise of mediation.
Also, if you really are a Democrat, well, perhaps Vermont is not as well-mannered as I once supposed.