The Republican President Barack Obama once nominated as commerce secretary said Sunday that the U.S. is on the brink of a fiscal meltdown that will give it “third-class status as a nation.”
Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., the senior Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, told C-SPAN that the biggest problem faced by the country is “the impending fiscal meltdown of our nation.” a risk he said is only exceeded by the risk of a terrorist attack using weapons of mass destruction.
“We’re taking ourselves down the road to third-class status as a nation,” Gregg said in the interview, which focused on the pending healthcare debate in the Senate that is expected to start this week.
Gregg criticized a rush of government spending for adding to the debt. But he also said entitlement spending is the real long-term budgetary problem facing the country.
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Last year’s deficit was a record $1.4 trillion, up more than $900 billion from the previous year. The budget was inflated because of much lower tax revenues, which were down because of the worst recession in generations, and government spending intended to stimulate the economy and rescue the financial industry.
Gregg said he would support a move to freeze discretionary spending.
“We almost don’t have to do anything to explain it,” said Gregg. “This is not difficult to understand. We don’t want to be a debtor nation. We don’t want to be a third-class nation.”
Read the full story at The Hill
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