Response to President Obama's State of the Union Address by
Frank Scaturro, Republican Canidadte for Congress ( NY - 4 )
Rockville Centre, NY
January 25, 2012


Good evening.  I am Frank Scaturro, Republican candidate for Congress in New York’s Fourth District.  I’m glad to be joined by many of my Long Island friends and neighbors.  Like so many people in this room, I am deeply concerned about the direction our country is heading.

You have heard the President’s vision for the next year and an eloquent response from Gov. Mitch Daniels.  The President’s address identified job creation and debt reduction as critical goals we all share.  In fact, he has identified those objectives for three straight years.  It would be encouraging to know that our government is actually focused on those goals.  Unfortunately, the reality we face is different from the words we hear. 

The reality is that the last several years have given us a financial crisis that has been followed by the longest period of economic hardship since the Great Depression.  More and more people remain jobless because potential job creators have lost their confidence in the economy.  It should be no surprise that they have lost that confidence.  Under the threat of higher taxes, they do not know how much of their own money the government will let them keep.  In an avalanche of regulatory mandates, they cannot predict the thousands of rules that have not yet been written by bureaucrats who have never been elected.  And as government continues to print money with reckless abandon, those who wish to invest in our future do not know the value of the dollar.

The severe downturn of the last few years has collided with another crisis—one that many have seen coming for more than a generation, and one for which both political parties are to blame.  I’m talking about the crisis of spending that came as our government made promise after promise without regard for whether the promises could be kept—and without regard for the price tag it was imposing on the next generation.  Our national debt now exceeds $15 trillion dollars.  It is equal to the size of our entire economy. To give you an idea of how staggering that number is, at the rate this administration has been going, it would incur more debt over eight years than the country did during its previous 220-year history from George Washington to George W. Bush.  Higher debt actually makes it more difficult for families to make basic life decisions like buying a home, buying a car, or sending a child to college.  Our government is limiting freedom and opportunity, and those who start out with the least opportunity are those who are hurt the most.

We see this here on Long Island, which is often considered the nation’s first suburb. It was populated by the arrival of families seeking a better life—many like my own from a working class or immigrant background.  We were brought up with the values on which the American dream is built: faith, family, hard work, and a commitment to playing by the rules.  The President has said a lot about “fairness,” but a truly fair system would enforce these values, not undermine them.  We are suffering because of a system that increasingly seems rigged.  Today, many seniors who made their lives here can no longer afford to stay.  Their children are finding during mid-career that there are fewer prospects for job advancement, if they are able to keep their jobs.  And their children are leaving at a faster rate than their grandparents before they even start their careers.

Those who are missing out on the opportunity their parents enjoyed are asking the government to allow them that opportunity.  They’re asking for honesty.  Instead, time and time again, their government tells them one thing and does another.  On the campaign trail in 2008, the President said that the worst thing to do during such times would be to raise taxes, but that is precisely what he and our representative in Congress, Carolyn McCarthy, have repeatedly tried to do.  Not long before, they stood firmly against reforming the policies that did so much to cause the mortgage crisis that hurt us all.  The 2009 stimulus bill was pushed by the administration with the promise that it would create jobs, yet unemployment then rose to over 10 percent.  And it is mystifying that we are now told “no bailouts” by those who pushed through the Dodd Frank bill, which effectively institutionalized bailouts.  When government uses its power wisely, it can create the conditions that encourage job creation and prosperity, but that did not occur here.  We can paraphrase Abraham Lincoln and say that the power of government should be focused on helping those who cannot help themselves.  It should not be used to buy votes or reward political friends.  Much of the over $1 trillion spent on bailouts and stimulus went to politically favored recipients while leaving the rest of us with an even larger debt than we began with.  We certainly will not reduce our debt by creating more debt, and when the government prints more money, it imposes a hidden tax on all of us.

There is a danger in having government picking winners and losers, with the winners often telling the rest of us, You pay for our risk and we take the profits.  When you reward the irresponsible, you destroy jobs and hurt those who are most in need.  When you set low expectations of people—when government treats people as if they lack the power to run their own lives or keep their hard-earned money—don’t be surprised if they meet those expectations.

Nor should we set low expectations of our elected officials.  Too often, they act as if their top priority is jockeying for partisan advantage.  This is clear even when we hear the over-hyping of the recent debate over the payroll tax cut: Sure, the tax cut is a good idea, but whether the tax cut is extended for only two months or one year, how is that going to help a prospective employer?  It is that much harder to give someone a meaningful job if you don’t know what your tax liability will be a year from now.

Or consider the debt deal Congress reached in August.  You would not know it from the spin, but by the most generous estimate of the deal, actual spending cuts over the next year will total $7 billion.  That’s how much the federal government spends in about 36 hours.  The Democratic leadership in the Senate has gone 1,000 days without even passing a budget.  If we want to get our fiscal house in order, it is well past time to get serious.  No more budget gimmicks.  No more excuses.

We need real, fundamental change.  That means not just lowering taxes, but replacing a convoluted tax code that has been a testament to the influence of special interests.  The President would make the tax code even more confusing.  Here’s how government can be truly fair: cut loopholes and adopt a simpler and flatter system for all.  And change means not just lowering spending, but reforming a broken spending process from top to bottom, with caps on spending and debt so that we don’t follow the example of Europe with a debt larger than our economy.

Every two years, candidates for federal office promise that they will go through all our spending with a fine tooth comb and identify the waste, but they never follow through.  Well, I think it’s well past time that they do it.  The same is true of the vast unelected bureaucracies that constitute most of the federal government.  Congress has the power to oversee them and rein them in.  Instead, its usual habit is to use federal agencies to avoid difficult decisions and then blame the agencies when things go wrong.

Strong families, fiscal responsibility, a regulatory system that protects free markets rather than stifle innovation, and a sound and stable dollar have been the four cornerstones of prosperity.  The truth is that no other system in the history of the world has done more to lift people from poverty.

And as we face the most predictable crisis in our recent history, we need to get serious about taking on a broken entitlement system, which consumes most federal spending.  Social Security and Medicare alone face a shortfall of $43 trillion, and if we do not act to fix them, our debt will explode even further, and the programs won’t be there for our children and grandchildren.   Virtually every one of our elected officials knows this, yet there is widespread fear that telling the truth and proposing honest solutions will hurt them politically.  We hear talk about fairness from the same leaders who oppose even a modest level of means testing, but there is nothing fair about having the government take money from working families and redistributing it to the wealthiest seniors, who have far less need for it.  If our leaders disagree with one proposal, they should offer another one.  It is not acceptable simply to criticize those who strive for a solution when staying with the status quo is the surest recipe for failure. 

Rather than address any of these problems, this administration, aided by Rep. McCarthy, have made matters worse by pushing through a new health care entitlement when we could least afford it.  They did so with no serious consideration of the Constitution, which should be the first responsibility of every elected official.  And failure to address our debt crisis does not only mortgage our children’s future.  It hurts our parents as their medical needs increase; and even more, it cripples the entire government’s ability to fulfill those other goals we all share regardless of our political leanings, from education to the environment to national defense.

We are already witnessing this in the proposed cuts to military spending.  Wasteful spending by the military certainly should be cut, but it is wrong to go so far as to weaken our ability to keep our nation safe and protect our interests abroad.  And we must remember our veterans: Our obligation to those who serve does not end when they come home.

When it comes to some of our other goals, the government would do well to remember how much it can accomplish by getting out of the way.  The administration’s refusal to approve the Keystone pipeline marks yet another blow to energy independence and common sense that would have created thousands of jobs on an environmentally safe project and would have allowed us to import oil from Canada instead of from less friendly countries like Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.  As a foreign policy matter, this is yet another example of how our government has alienated some of our most important allies without standing up effectively to the world’s most dangerous regimes.

We stand on the shoulders of generations who have made tremendous sacrifices—often the ultimate sacrifice—to give us this great nation.  That sacrifice also obligates those who enter public life to conduct themselves with utmost integrity.  Because of the distortions in our political process, there is a tendency for many voters to blame the failures of Washington on every member of Congress except their own.  Others give up on the system altogether.  I urge my fellow citizens not to give up, but to look at your alternatives from a clean slate.  Reform will occur only if you ask for it.  Many of us are running for office for the same reason you are dissatisfied.

This is no time to sit back and leave our country to leaders who believe they are presiding over America’s decline.  During the early months of the Revolutionary War, George Washington wrote that “Perseverance and Spirit have done Wonders in all ages.”  That remains true, and that is why our nation has overcome challenge after challenge.  We’re here because we believe this country’s best days are ahead of us.  But those days won’t come unless we expand freedom and opportunity rather than limit them.  If others won’t do it, we will.  Getting there is not about having you believe more in government.  It’s a matter of government believing in you.  Thank you for listening.  God bless you, and God bless our great country.