Washington spending – it’s not a bad habit, it’s an addiction

In the last five years, Washington has governed from fiscal crisis to fiscal crisis. Terms like "debt ceiling," "continuing resolution," "fiscal cliff," "sequester," have become commonplace in our vocabulary. U.S. revenues under the Obama Administration gross a record $3 trillion annually, yet our national debt recently topped $17 trillion.

When you make it a habit of waiting until the last minute – and in recent cases, letting deadlines become more of a suggestion – you fail to reach any sort of meaningful reforms and instead address the immediate issue. This was most recently exhibited last month in the Harry Reid/Mitch McConnell plan that gave President Obama exactly what he wanted: a debt ceiling increase with no corresponding spending cuts and no relief for families and individuals subject to the Obamacare individual mandate. This so-called "solution" sets us up to have these same fights again in just a few months.

Until we address the root of the problem, out-of-control spending, we will find ourselves in this same spot year after year, and we will never catch up. There has to be a stopping point. President Obama said in his 2010 State of the Union address, "If we don't take meaningful steps to rein in our debt, it could damage our markets, increase the cost of borrowing, and jeopardize our recovery." Under Obama's watch, our national debt is on track to double since his first day in office.

We need a long-term spending addiction recovery plan, not just short-term extensions. The first step in this plan should be to address waste, fraud, abuse and duplication within the government. Nancy Pelosi recently made the claim that there is not a single area where Congress can find savings to reduce the deficit, "Because the cupboard is bare. There's [sic] no more cuts to make." I disagree. We could take a microscope to more closely examine government programs that are outdated, completed or quite frankly senseless, but in many cases the very programs that need examination are clearly fraught with waste, fraud, abuse, and massive overlap.

Nancy Pelosi must have skipped over the Government Accountability Office third annual report on government duplication which revealed $95 billion in overlap, combined with the $200 billion in overlap identified in GAO's previous two reports. This could have easily covered the costs of sequestration.

For example, in 2011 Medicare wrongly paid $29 million in drug costs for 4,000 people illegally in the U.S., $23 million for services of Medicare patients who were dead, and $25 million in payments to deceased doctors. This level of preventable waste continues to threaten the stability of the already cash-strapped Medicare program and could easily be corrected.

Other examples include the Federal Communications Commission's free cell phone program, costing taxpayers nearly $2 billion last year. SportsUnited, a State Department program, spent $5.5 billion tax dollars to send American and foreign athletes on trips around the world. And at $30 million, the Medicaid audit program costs more than Medicaid brings in.

The list goes on and on. It's no wonder Americans don't trust the federal government – and rightfully so! President Obama and congressional Democrats insist on taking MORE of your hard-earned dollars through tax increases while ignoring this shocking amount of waste, fraud and abuse. Raising taxes on families and businesses is not the solution to our fiscal problems. Our overly complicated tax code needs reforming, but how will Americans benefit in the long-run if their tax dollars continue to be wasted?

Government spending must be brought under control in a responsible way. Agencies need to take a hard look at their wasteful and overlapping programs, safety procedures and waste mechanisms must be enforced in order to prevent fraud, and Congress must get back to regular order and pass a budget rather than prohibitive continuing resolutions. These are real solutions that will bring spending under control while protecting hard-earned tax dollars. Americans deserve better.