Released Their Fiscal Year 2022 Budget
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1 Fellow Americans, We’ve faced a year of unprecedented spending. Since March of last year, we’ve spent over $7.6 tril- lion dollars, almost $62,000 per American household, and more than the federal government spent in the first 200 years of our nation’s history. We’ve spent more in the last year than the annual economic production of every country in the world except our own, China, and India. It’s not just the spending that stifles our economy. Interest costs on the debt alone are expected to almost triple in ten years, making interest on the national credit card the third largest federal program behind only Medicare and Social Security. As you can imagine, getting our spending under control and eliminating the deficit will prove to be a herculean task. How do we turn this thing around and ensure the world’s largest economy isn’t head- ed toward a fiscal doomsday? Fortunately for America, producing an alternative budget is the signature issue for the Republican Study Committee. We’ve gotten pretty good at it. And each year that we produce it, we provide a roadmap toward balancing the budget without raising taxes. This year, despite the massive amount of new spending, is no different. We—the RSC Budget and Spending Task Force—put our noses to the grindstone and produced a budget that would balance the budget in 5 years. With our national debt climbing to $28.1 trillion and beyond, we don’t need to tell you why it’s so important we reverse our current course. That’s why we appropriately named this budget Reclaiming Our Fiscal Future. That’s what we, as House conservatives, are doing. But Speaker Pelosi is ignoring this massive, urgent problem. She and Congressional Democrats are shirking their responsibility and will not be producing a real budget this year—at all. Speaker Pelosi said at the beginning of the pandemic that we are “captains of the ship.” We com- pletely agree. But the American people want to know that responsible people are running it. And we have not seen any signal from Democrat leadership that they will take up their duty and provide a roadmap toward fiscal responsibility. That’s why we’ve done Democrats’ job for them. Now, we urge Speaker Pelosi to take up our budget and put it on the floor for a vote. _________________________ _________________________ Rep. Jim Banks (IN-03) Rep. Kevin Hern (OK-01) RSC Chairman Budget and Spending Task Force Chairman 2 _________________________ _________________________ Rep. Roger Williams (TX-25) Rep. Trent Kelly (MS-01) _________________________ _________________________ Rep. Ralph Norman (SC-05) Rep. Ron Estes (KS-04) _________________________ _________________________ Rep. Michael Cloud (TX-27) Rep. Ben Cline (VA-06) _________________________ _________________________ Rep. Byron Donalds (FL-19) Rep. Bob Good (VA-05) 3 INTRODUCTION..................................................................................................................................5 FISCAL STATE OF THE UNION.........................................................................................................11 ENSURING LIBERTY THROUGH DEREGULATION........................................................................16 CREATING OPPORTUNITY THROUGH TAX REFORM...................................................................29 OPPORTUNITY THROUGH EMPOWERMENT AND SELF-SUFFICIENCY.....................................36 PROVIDE FOR THE COMMON DEFENSE.......................................................................................53 PROTECTING CONSERVATIVE VALUES........................................................................................69 PERSONALIZED & AFFORDABLE HEALTH CARE.......................................................................76 SAVING MEDICARE..........................................................................................................................84 REFORMING DISABILITY INSURANCE..........................................................................................91 MAKE SOCIAL SECURITY SOLVENT AGAIN.................................................................................98 BUDGET PROCESS REFORM........................................................................................................104 OTHER MANDATORY SPENDING..................................................................................................114 DISCRETIONARY SPENDING.........................................................................................................138 APPENDIX - SUMMARY TABLES...................................................................................................153 4 RSC FY2022 BUDGET: RECLAIMING OUR FISCAL FUTURE In a world governed by despots concerned with their own welfare, our nation’s founders laid out a vi- sion for a government devoted to safeguarding the pursuit of happiness of all citizens. They used our nation’s founding charter to, for the first time, enshrine government recognition of the rights, endowed by God, of all people. They placed their faith, and hope for the future, in the intangible power of our workers, families, and entrepreneurs—what would become the great American middle class. For two and a half centuries, our system has been the backbone of the unprecedented rise in the quality and length of life across the world. It was the faith our founders placed in our people that has made all the difference. Each of us is clearly given, by our creator, the ability to live and act freely. The choice that each of us has, individually and as a society, is how we apply these gifts. Do we use our abilities to restrict those of others to our own immediate benefit? Or do we live by laws that conserve those rights for all?The despots of our founders’ time chose the former. With no faith in their nation, those despots doomed both their people and themselves to poverty and stagnation. Our founders understood that the key to a prosperous future lies in the innovation of people free to pursue their passions. With their rights protected, people will use them to create systems to meet the needs and desires of themselves and their neighbors naturally and efficiently. This application of our natural rights is the foundation of our nation’s free market system. Out of this recognition, the found- ers devoted our government to conserving the rights essential to safeguard this process. Their hope for the future, rooted in an understanding of the past, led them to this faith - a faith in the process of freedom, bounded by laws that conserve rights. This is at the core of what it means to be a conserva- tive. Though socialists try to paint people’s needs and desires as purely materialistic, we know that is not the case. As conservatives, we understand that “man does not live by bread alone.”1 We are each driven by what we are passionate about: the people, things, and dreams we love. Out of this love and freedom, Americans built a society focused on family and community formation and the importance of art, honor, charity, and sacrifice. Free nations do so much more than focus on material wealth. They cherish these universal motivations and use their freedom to achieve them. Free markets are the sys- tem through which a free people can efficiently use their resources to achieve these deeper and more meaningful goals. Out of this faith, the Republican Study Committee (RSC) was founded to protect the liberty, oppor- tunity, and security of the American people through the conservation of their natural rights. Federal budgets are more than charts and numbers. Budgetary figures reflect the real-world intervention of the government in the lives of our people. This budget is a reflection of the conservative values of its authors. The policies and reforms proposed here are designed to appropriately limit government and prevent tyrannical abuses. However, in a bid to radically transform our country, these foundational values are under attack from 1 Mathew 4:4, 21st Century King James Version, Bible Gateway, Accessed April 11, 2021, https://www. biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%204:3-5&version=CJB. 5 two groups: Crony Corporatists and the Socialistic Left. The corporatists try to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else. They pursue rent-seeking behavior and believe the law should be for sale. They view the law as a tool for the powerful and not a protector of the people. The socialists, faithless and pessimistic, view people as undeserving and wasteful of their natural autonomy. With condescending arrogance, they view the law as a means to redistribute this autonomy to those they deem worthy— the central government planners that attempt to play God. They reject any hope in future innovation and choose to micromanage the present. At their core, what these groups reject is the essence of what it means to be a human being. Working together, they have begun to dismantle the middle class, disempowering and impoverishing the people of our nation. This agreement, where the socialists sell the law and the corporatists buy the law, masquerades as free market order. Do not be deceived, however. Any system where laws are made at the arbitrary whim of the powerful is just a form of anarchy. There is neither freedom nor order in this ephemeral and materialistic dystopia. Their partnership offers only a return to the despotism our founders fought to rid from the world. To indulge the false promises of the corporatists and the socialists would be to throw away our God-given rights. They see these rights as a hindrance