WASHINGTON–Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) has found many ways to say he disapproves of the way the Senate operates in his three years serving, so far. But, perhaps the most effective messages come when he directly addresses what he sees as major problems that could affect your future. Braun is fed up with Congress spending too much of your money and not budgeting properly.
“I think the process is broken. We don’t do regular order,” said Braun, in a Senate hearing Tuesday, expressing his disapproval of the appropriations process, in which he says proper budgeting is ignored.
“We’re talking about continuing resolutions because we have not had the ability and the political will to get this done by Sept. 30, of 2021.”
Not only is the budget timeline being largely ignored, but part of Braun’s gripe is that deficits are now often built in to the budget, rather than requiring that the budget be balanced.
“It is a system that has just gone completely out of control,” he said. “I’ll put one other doozy in there. Just a little over three years ago we were nearly $18 trillion in debt. Now we’re nearly 30.”
Much of the addition to the debt was in the form of relief bills, which added trillions a a time, passed during the pandemic, to keep the country’s economy from going belly-up.
Braun said that American lawmakers seem to have an attitude that is completely the opposite of the Congress following World War II and the enormous debt that was incurred by the war.
“We were savers. We were investors. We aid all that off and built the interstate highway system. That seems like a big story of fiction now,” he said. “So many people come to this institution wanting more and don’t even realize that the worst news is down the road when the Medicare trust fund goes completely bust in four and a half years, after paying into it since the 60s, Social Security in ten or eleven years.”
Braun later Tweeted a video of what he was talking about.
“There seems to be no end in sight. Both sides are responsible for the spending up to this point,” he said in the video.
