Walden explains GOP payroll stand
Congressman criticizes growing costs of regulation
By RaeLynn Ricarte
The Dalles Chronicle
https://bit.ly/rqTMAz
Congressman Greg Walden visited Wednesday with The Dalles Rotary Club as one of four stops the same day in four different counties.
The Republican leader, who was born in The Dalles and lives in Hood River, told Rotary members he had just flown his 438th round trip between Washington, D.C., and Oregon since taking office in 1999. He said that amounted to 2.2 million air miles or four trips around the moon.
“When you work in Washington, it’s sometimes hard to tell when you are in outer space and when you are not,” he quipped in reference to continual partisan bickering over key issues.
Walden started Dec. 28 with a no-host breakfast town hall at Bob’s Texas T-Bone in Rufus. He then met with wheat growers in Condon before traveling to The Dalles to speak at the noon meeting of the Rotary Club. Following his appearance there, the congressman was headed to a couple of informal meetings and then to Fossil for a dinner town hall.
Walden told Rotary members it is often difficult to get the Republican message represented by the mainstream media, which was a source of frustration for GOP leaders. He said a recent example of that challenge was the gridlock between both parties over the time period for extension of the payroll tax holiday.
In news reports, Walden said Republicans were painted as opposing middle-class tax breaks when they didn’t sign on to the Senate plan to extend the benefit for two months and then look for a more permanent solution. In reality, he said GOP leaders felt that decision marked one of the briefest tax measures yet and was part of a troubling trend for Congress to “kick the can down the down the road” to avoid dealing with controversial issues.
The payroll tax break was originally passed in December 2010 as one way to get more money back into the ailing economy. It was part of a package that also provided a two-year extension to the Bush-era tax cuts that were adopted in 2001. The “holiday” lowered the percentage of money paid by about 160 million workers into the Social Security trust fund by 2 percent, a savings for the average family of about $1,000 per year.
Walden said the twists and turns taken by the Democrat-controlled Senate to avoid making tough decisions has created uncertainty in the marketplace that is hurting the ability of businesses to expand and grow, thereby creating new jobs. He said the House sent the Senate a bipartisan plan to create jobs, take care of those seeking work and provide working families with tax relief, but that proposal was rejected and its merits never explored by the media.
He was asked at Rotary if House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, had lost control of the GOP in his chamber. Many Conservative legislators opposed continuing the payroll tax break at all without first finding a way to cover the $120 billion loss in 2012 from Social Security at a time when the trust fund was going broke. Boehner ended up with what political pundits referred to as a “fiasco” when he was put in the position of unsuccessfully demanding that Senators return to Washington from their holiday leave to rework the bill. He finally managed to gain House support for the Senate plan by attaching a provision to the tax extension measure that requires Pres. Barack Obama to make a decision on the Keystone IX pipeline within 60 days.
“Being the Speaker is like trying to keep 425 bull frogs on a flatbed truck,” said Walden. “Nobody in the House is working for the Speaker because they all got there the same way that he did.”
He praised Boehner for a calm leadership style that focused on helping freshman House members better understand the political process and how the nation’s founders had intended for it to work. Despite frequent standoffs between Democrats and Republicans over legislative issues, especially those involving taxation and spending, Walden said the number of earmarks inserted into bills had been reduced from 8,000 in 2010 fiscal year to zero in 2011. He said 42 programs had also been eliminated, all of which had brought a slight reduction in the discretionary budget, from $1.1 billion to $1.0 billion.
He also viewed as an accomplishment the House-led approval of long-stalled free trade agreements with Columbia, Panama and South Korea. He said 250,000 American jobs would be created by that move and Oregon would realize $42 million in agricultural exports each year.
“It’s not huge, it’s not Orwellian, but it all adds up,” said Walden.
He said federal officials could help strengthen the economy and create more jobs by paring back regulations that made it difficult for businesses to grow and even survive. He said of the 4,225 regulations now in the federal pipeline, seven would cost the economy more than $1 billion each. He said the Small Business Administration had estimated that regulations cost the economy $1.75 trillion per year.
As an example, he showed a diagram of how new EPA rules to create a buffer zone for pesticide application near waterways, if enacted, could pare 108 acres of farmable land in Sherman County down to seven acres under a worst-case scenario.
Walden recently voted in favor of legislation that is intended to lift the regulatory burden on small businesses that is preventing them from growing or, in some cases, even surviving. The Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act, which was approved in early December by the House requires that Congress take an up-or-down vote on agency regulations that have an economic impact of $100 million or more before they can be enacted.
Walden was asked by one Rotary member if he had endorsed any of the GOP presidential candidates. He said Mitt Romney had gained his support because the former Massachusetts governor was “the best qualified to run, win and govern effectively.” Walden’s endorsement is viewed as notable because he is a rising star in the House; serving as deputy chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee and chair of the House Republican leadership.