Rep. Eric Cantor Insists Balancing the Budget Won't Fix All Fiscal Problems; Also, He's Not a Loser
Lest Rep. Eric Cantor’s feel the sting of rejection twice in less than 24 hours, Imus apologized immediately for being ten minutes late for this morning’s interview, and informed his Republican guest that the same fate befell Rep. Anthony Weiner, a Democrat, yesterday.
“Equal opportunity with you always,” Cantor, now the Majority Leader in the House, said, a tone of suppressed anger detectable in his voice. He was far less passive, however, when prompted for his reaction to last night’s State of the Union address.
“We know the President can give a good speech, and last night was no exception,” Cantor said. “He talked about a better future, and as a parent of three teenagers, certainly that’s a priority for me.”
Predictably, he disagreed with Obama on almost everything else. “I want to cut more spending than he does, I have a lot of differences in terms of the health care system in this country and how I think we can make it better,” Cantor said. Backing off a bit, Cantor added, “But the President did talk about some things that I think we can work together on.”
For instance, lowering corporate tax rates in order to create jobs; simplifying the tax code; and working together to produce free trade agreements are priorities for both men. But Cantor noted that saying something and actually doing it are two different beasts.
“We in the House are very committed to trying to slash spending, to trying to get rid of the regulations that are impeding growth in this economy so we can try to restore prosperity in America,” he said.
Imus thinks, perhaps naively, that simply cutting all of the waste in Congress could help balance the budget in this country. “We’ve got to start somewhere,” Cantor said, pointing out that his Party voted to ban earmarks, which he said will result in a $16 billion “attempt” to stop the rampant spending in Washington.
“This is a starting place for us in order to signal to people of this country, as well as investors, that the federal government is actually going to get its act together and maintain a fiscally responsible course,” Cantor said, but Imus wasn’t buying it, and pressed his guest for a more specific answer.
Balancing the budget by cutting waste, in Cantor’s view, will not solve all the problems in government. “We have dug ourselves such a hole with these entitlements, and the culture that has been bred by this,” he said. “We’ve got some more structural things to address.”
Though Imus prefaced his next question by saying, “I hate to ask this,” all evidence to the contrary, as he giddily wondered how Cantor felt after House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi turned down the opportunity to be his “date” for the State of the Union last night, where, for the first time in recent memory, Republicans and Democrats sat side by side.
“Nancy Pelosi stood me up for Roscoe Bartlett,” Cantor said, glumly. “He’s a great guy. There’s other fish in the sea for me. I had a very affable seatmate—I sat next to my neighbor, the Democratic Congressman who represents the other portion of the city of Richmond, Bobby Scott.”
Cantor seemed pleased with the outcome, but Imus sensed otherwise. “It makes you look like a loser,” he informed his guest, whose prominent new role in Congress suggests otherwise.
-Julie Kanfer
Eric Cantor 
Reader Comments (1)
There was no naivety in Don’s thought that cutting all the waste in Congress could help balance the
budget. It’s not just the monetary benefit which would be realized but, more importantly, it would expose the core problem: “the inefficiency of the government”.
Cantor and the GOP admit responsibility for their part of the mess but, only in the most general of terms. Addressing specific instances of waste in government would reveal the extent of their culpability. They, like the Dems, don’t have the honor or integrity to allow the public to see behind the curtain.
An example of this is military base housing. The Newt Gingrich lead GOP “Contract with America” Congress authored the legislation that created the Military Housing Privatization Initiative. President Clinton signed it into law on a trial basis. This allows the DoD to enter into contracts with private developers to build and manage on base housing. The problem is this initiative failed to comply with DoD Housing Policy, failed to honor the overwhelming housing preference of military service members and their families, and wasted tax dollars.
Justification for this initiative was based on inaccurate data intended to create a self-perpetuating need for unneeded base housing.
The George Bush administration made this program permanent. This means at the same time the government was altering the home lending laws to allow people who couldn’t afford to buy a home, buy a home they were impeding service members who could afford to buy a home from doing so.
I know this is true because I have copies of the GAO, CBO, and DoD IG reports from which the above statements were taken.
Maybe IMUS along with Fox “The Power to Prosper” Business Network could use their platform to help military service members and their families prosper in the nation they defend by exposing this fraud.