STRASBURG -- To put their future in perspective, students in a Strasburg High School government class journeyed to outer space with Rep. Bob Goodlatte on Tuesday morning.
Any visit by a politician to anywhere nowadays will inevitably touch on the economy and government spending, and after a short presentation about being the ranking member of the House of Representatives' impeachment task force, Goodlatte took questions from Larry Vance's students that brought up those very issues. The 6th District Republican, who is a proponent of a tightened and balanced federal budget, gave a brief history lesson of how in a matter of a few decades the word "trillion" has replaced "million" in terms of government borrowing and spending, including for such things as the stimulus bill and health care reform.
A 4-inch stack of $1,000 bills would equate to $1 million, Goodlatte said, and to reach $1 trillion, that pile would have to soar into outer space. The national debt is $13 trillion, he said.
"They [Congress] kick the can right down the road," Goodlatte said to the students, "and the can is coming right at you."
The immediate follow-up question from a student was what the congressman suggested doing about the bleak economic future that he painted. Across-the-board spending cuts and elimination of some federal programs, or at least a 5 or 10 percent cut in funding for each, are places to start, Goodlatte said.
"We as a country spend way more money than we take in now," he said.
The problem is that the federal government operates differently than local and state governments by not being saddled with the task of balancing its budget, Goodlatte said. In 46 years, the budget has been balanced only four times, he added.
"We should be balancing it every year, except in times of war or emergency," said Goodlatte, whose seat will be on the ballot in the November general election.
Instead, it is projected that Congress will borrow at least $800 billion a year for the next 10 years, he said.
"It's unsustainable," Goodlatte said. "It's going to affect your ability to get jobs."
Those with opposing viewpoints on spending have trouble saying no to their constituents, he said, even though the causes people ask to have funded are worthy ones, from medical research to the environment to the military. These politicians never sit down and total up the numbers, Goodlatte said, and simply choose to borrow money instead.
To his constituents, that appears to be a problem -- he said during a recent telephone town hall meeting, half of the thousands of listeners chose government spending as the most serious problem, among five options, facing America. Jobs and health care were next in line.
It may take a constitutional amendment restricting the ability of government to borrow money to accomplish a balanced budget and bring the national debt back down to earth, Goodlatte said to the class.
"That's how much money we've spent from your future," he said.
