U.S. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga) released a statement today calling for President Barack Obama and the Senate Democrats to come up with a plan to avoid the automatic defense and non-defense budget cuts, knows as the sequester, due to kick in on March 1st.
The sequester would cut $85 billion from this year’s $3.6 trillion budget.
“With the March 1st deadline just a few days away and no deal in sight, the president’s sequester has pink slips being printed, leaving millions of families uneasy and employers on edge,” said Westmoreland in a press release. “After all of the speeches and state visits, we still don’t have a plan from the president or Senate Democrats. The campaign rhetoric may have gotten President Obama reelected, but it’s not how you get business done. What the American people need are real solutions, not speeches.”
The Georgia lawmaker goes on mention that the House Republicans came up with two separate bills to remove the sequester, the Sequester Replacement Reconciliation Act and the Spending Reduction Act of 2012, but both were blocked by the President.
All the while, as Westmoreland points out, both the President and his press secretary Jay Carney admitted that the sequester is a “bad idea” and this time around - it was the President’s idea.
At some point, President Obama referred to sequester as “brutal" and a "meat cleaver approach.” In addition, the White House website says that the sequester is “threatening hundreds of thousands of jobs, and cutting vital services for children, seniors, people with mental illness and our men and women in uniform.”
Despite that, Westmoreland says, the President and his party haven’t come up with a solution.
“We can’t tax our way out of this deficit, and we certainly can’t tax Americans more for the president’s bad policy,” said the Congressman. “With America sitting on a debt of over $16 trillion, we need to focus on sensible spending reductions and responsible reforms because we have a spending problem, and the sequester is not the solution.”
Rep. Westmoreland represents Georgia’s 3rd congressional district.
Click here to view the full press release.
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