While the Democratic Senate has refused to pass a budget in over three years, the United States debt has climbed to $16 trillion — a record high that it will hit today.
By failing to outline any serious plan for the financial future of this country, Democrats who run the Senate and the White House have no basis on which to ask to be kept in their majority,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee. ” The nation is in desperate need of strong executive leadership to end the financial chaos, restore discipline to government, and lead us to an economic renaissance.”
Sessions noted that the U.S. has more debt-per-citizen than Portugal, Italy, Spain, or Greece — four of the so-called PIIGS of the European Union (Ireland is the fifth) who have defaulted or risk defaulting on their debt.
“This is a grim landmark,” he said. “Yet the President seems strangely unconcerned. His budget, which received zero votes in the House or Senate, would add another $66,000 in debt for every American household. And the President’s majority in the Senate, which is required by law to produce a budget plan every single year, has refused to do so for more than 1,200 days.”
Such fiscal irresponsibility is among the reasons that Democrats in moderate states — such as Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va — are staying away from this week’s Democratic National Convention.
Manchin, when asked why his party leadership refused to pass a budget, explained that “they don’t want to risk the next election.”
Vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan made the same point, a little more bluntly. “They don’t want to show you what their vision of government costs,” he told The Washington Examiner earlier this year.
