Club for Growth Calls Harry Reid’s Unemployment Insurance Offset a “Joke”

Andrew Roth  |   January 14, 2014
 Club for Growth President Chris Chocola: “Is Harry Reid’s proposal a joke? Only in Washington is a something considered an ‘offset’ when the spending cut is ten years from now but the spending increase is today.” 

Washington, DC – The Club for Growth issued the following statement on Harry Reid’s proposal to offset an extension of Unemployment Insurance benefits by extending sequestration cuts to Medicare providers by one year from 2023 to 2024. 

“Is Harry Reid’s proposal a joke? Only in Washington is a something considered an ‘offset’ when the spending cut is ten years from now but the spending increase is today,” said Club for Growth President Chris Chocola. “Even liberal Democrats like Steny Hoyer have seen the flaw in that logic. We’ve played this fiscal shell game too many times. First Republicans and Democrats raised the debt limit by trillions and promised to do sequestration if we couldn’t get our debt under control. Then Republicans and Democrats partially undid sequestration with the Ryan-Murray budget and promised to pay for it with cuts a decade from now. Why don’t we just pay for everything by promising to cut spending twenty years from now? Or a hundred?” 

“The longer we fail to address the drivers of our debt and deficit, the more harm we do to our long-term economic future. It’s sad that the big spenders in both parties continue to hide behind budgetary fantasies instead of getting serious about our spending addiction,” added Chocola. 

Even liberal Democrats like Steny Hoyer agree: offsets in the future are not offsets 

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD) on Reid’s Unemployment Insurance  offset proposal: “Frankly, if you adopt that logic, why don’t we extend it to 2054 and fund everything we want to do?”: Under the Reid proposal, approximately $17 billion would be raised for an unemployment insurance extension this year by prolonging sequestration’s 2 percent cut to Medicare into 2024. The same ploy was used to help pass a budget deal this past December with bipartisan support (the cuts were extended into 2022 and 2023). But Hoyer argued that to do so again made little policy sense. “Frankly, if you adopt that logic, why don’t we extend it to 2054 and fund everything we want to do?” Hoyer said. “I just think the sequester is not a proper premise on which to base funding.” (Huffington Post, 1/10/14)