Short-term and long-term entitlement reform is the solution to bridging the expanding gap between spending and revenue, something that is increasing the sizable national debt, President of Americans for Tax Reform Grover Norquist said Thursday on
Newsmax TV's "America's Forum."
"The Obama administration has spent six years telling us they'd like to do entitlement reform, but they've never put any forward with the following exception, they added Obamacare, another open-ended entitlement," Norquist said.
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"They didn't reform any of the ones we had. It's a lot like Bill Clinton who said he wanted to reform welfare, but when he got into office he increased welfare. It was only when the Republicans won the House and Senate three times, passed welfare reform, that he eventually signed the third one, vetoed the first two.
"We have a problem. It's coming, it's big. Obama's done nothing about it. It may take a different president to fix."
According to Norquist, the first entitlement to reform should be Obamacare, which some reports find costs $50,000 for every person who receives it.
Some 35 reforms to the president's universal healthcare law have already occurred (10 by Congress and 25 by the president, he said) but many are "temporary and at the whim of the president."
Because the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has been cagey in its reporting of the true costs of Obamacare, Norquist said, the director needs to be replaced.
"Remember the way they got Obamacare passed was to misstate how much it cost in taxes, to pretend that certain costs weren't going to happen until later," he said. "This is a very serious problem. You have a thoroughly politicized CBO which works for the Democratic Party and a Democratic president, not doing actually economic analysis.
"We need economists there, not political hacks," he said. "And just because you have a degree from a university doesn't mean that you can't be a Chicago machine politician at the same time.
"That's what we have running CBO, when we need straight shooters who will actually run the numbers and not cover for Obamacare and Obama's failures."
Norquist said he has faith that the American people will shake some sense into Washington before the United States goes the way of Greece, which is in the throes of an economic crisis.
"Greece can get bailed out by the Germans and the European Union," Norquist said. "We don't have anybody to bail us out. We bail out other people when they do stupid things. We bail out New York City when they go bankrupt. We bail out lots of businesses when they go bankrupt.
I don't think we should, but we do," he said. "But no one will bail us out if we don't reform our entitlement programs before we crash."
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