Editor Note: Each week, U.S. Rep. Jerry Moran and Todd Tiahrt will provide a blog posting discussing issues in Washington D.C. This is an entry from Tiahrt for this week:
On Thursday, House Republicans made great strides in changing the way Washington spends the People’s tax dollars. I was pleased to support a one-year moratorium on all authorization and appropriation earmarks.
This move by the House GOP takes us a step closer toward implementing comprehensive earmark accountability for authorizing and appropriations committees. Now if we can only convince the Obama administration and congressional Democrats to follow suit.
During a time of trillion-dollar debts and trillion-dollar bailouts, Kansas taxpayers should know where their hard-earned money is being directed. And Congress should be more judicious and fiscally constrained in how it spends money.
Unfortunately, banning earmarks doesn’t save taxpayers a single dollar (the money is still spent) – we need to force the overall budget to be reduced so taxpayers can begin to see a reduction in the bloated spending that plagues Washington.
For years I have been fighting for reduced spending and for more sunshine in the process so Americans can better understand how funds are directed, especially by the administration and authorizing committees – who have had little oversight or public scrutiny for how they craft multi-billion dollar spending bills each year that earmark billions in tax dollars.
We must put in place long-term rules and boundaries to which the administration and Congress adhere. That’s why Congressman Zach Wamp from Tennessee and I introduced an earmark reform bill (H. Con. Res 201) last October that would impose an across-the-board moratorium on all earmarks while a special joint committee offers solutions for making the process more transparent to the public. With more sunshine comes more accountability.
Grover Norquist, Americans for Tax Reform, and Americans for Prosperity have announced their strong support for my proposal. You can read about their support of the Tiahrt/Wamp bill by clicking here.
Kansas taxpayers are tired of the games they see in Washington and deserve to have full transparency and accountability for each and every tax dollar being spent. It’s time to end the “business as usual” days of self-edifying monuments and special-interest pet projects and stop Washington’s wasteful spending of tax dollars.
