NU Online News Service, April 14, 1:41 p.m. EST
WASHINGTON—Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-Ohio, criticized the president's debt plan, calling it campaign rhetoric, in a speech before an insurance agents' group.
Speaking at the Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America's (IIABA) Legislative Conference breakfast, part of the association's Legislative Conference and Convention held here this week, Boehner said, "It is 18 months before the election and the president is out there giving a campaign speech as opposed to saying something serious about how we deal with the debt limit and how we deal with the fiscal crisis that we face."
He added, "I can't tell you how disappointed I was in what the president had to say."
He said he thought he and the president had an understanding about what needs to be done to reduce the deficit and that now is the time to address this crisis. Instead, he said the only concrete thing the president said he would do was "to raise more taxes."
"Washington doesn't have a revenue problem," Boehner declared to applause. "Washington has a spending problem."
He said the problem is affecting jobs because the government's borrowing and spending means less is being invested in the communities and sectors that create jobs, such as those jobs independent agents create in their communities.
He reiterated the Republicans' stance that the "health care law that you grapple with" needs to be repealed and that short of repealing it outright, "We will do all we can to dismantle it piece by piece."
As an example, he noted the repeal of the 1099 reporting provision in the health care law that would have required small business to file tax forms for purchases and services of over $600 in a year from individual vendors during the year beginning in 2012.
He said the provision would have cost more in filing and compliance than it would have taken in.
Boehner went on to say that there is a "regulatory juggernaut" underway by every agency in the federal government to impose more regulation on businesses.
Zeroing in on the Dodd-Frank Act, he said the law punishes everyone except those who created the problem that crippled the economy in the first place.
In contrast to Boehner, Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., addressing the same gathering, said the deficit cannot be addressed by cutting alone, and a combination of fiscal and tax reform including revenue enhancement will need to be implemented to do address the $14 trillion deficit.
She pointed out that any time the budget has been balanced within the past 45 years, revenues coming into the general treasury, relative to GDP, have equaled 20-21 percent. Today, that figure stands at 18-19 percent.
Some individuals, she suggested, want to reduce that number further back to a point to where it was pre-1900s, "but most people don't want that."
She stressed the need for compromise to "get the ship sailing in the right direction."
Turning to the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), Landrieu, who is chairwoman of Senate Small Business Committee, said while passage of a program extension is in the process, "we are not out of the woods yet." She said questions around the program's more than $18 billion in debt still need to be addressed. She added there is a need for insurance to deal with catastrophic risk throughout the country, making insurance affordable for all Americans.
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