Our nation’s debt has skyrocketed to more than $11 trillion dollars. That works out to more than $36,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States. Much of this debt is financed by foreign creditors like China. Simply put, we can’t keep putting obligations on the national credit card. The federal government should look at its budget the same way that South Dakota families look at theirs – stop spending what we don’t have and cut back where needed.

As a member of the Blue Dog Coalition, I am a strong supporter of fiscal responsibility and budget reforms to ensure our nation’s long term fiscal solvency. The Blue Dogs have been instrumental in implementing new House pay-as-you-go rules, which require that any new spending or tax cut must be offset, or revenue neutral. In the short term, we need to strengthen those rules, and hold to them because these are the policies that produced budget surpluses in the 1990s. In the long term, we need to look seriously at entitlement reform, which is the real ticking time bomb for our national debt.

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