NoPigs: National Organization for People vs. Irresponsible Government Spending

PAOLI, Ind. -- Saying many Hoosiers are becoming troubled by the prospect of trillion-dollar federal deficits, Paoli attorney Todd Young today filed papers with the Federal Election Commission to create an exploratory campaign committee for Indiana’s Ninth Congressional District.

Connie Nass, former Indiana State Auditor and mayor of Huntingburg, is serving as treasurer of the committee, and State Sen. Brent Steele, R-Bedford, is serving as a senior adviser.

Young, a Marine Corps veteran with an MBA from the University of Chicago, said he wants to be ready to offer Ninth District voters a chance to say “enough!” to the growing spending frenzy in Washington.

“I know it is early to be talking about a political campaign, but it is not too early to be concerned about the dangerous levels of deficit spending now being recommended by Congress and the Obama Administration,” said Young, a former policy adviser to Sen. Dick Lugar.

Current estimates are that if President Obama signs into law a stimulus bill of $825 billion, the fiscal ’09 deficit will soar to at least $1.3 trillion, more than double last year’s $541 deficit. By 2010, total federal debt could reach $14 trillion, or 95 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.

President Obama is arguing that the stimulus bill will create up to 4 million new jobs.

Young notes that if that happens, each job would come at a cost of $206,250 – four times the average annual household income in the United States.

“Americans may not realize how enormously inefficient this bill would be,” Young said. “These enormous deficits are ultimately going to force huge tax increases on the American public or trigger an inflationary cycle that will greatly reduce the buying power of Americans’ savings and retirement accounts. We have not seen deficit spending on this scale since World War II. It’s time to sound the alarm.”

Young said that in the coming weeks, he will try to meet and speak with as many Ninth District voters as possible to assess their concerns about the economy and their desire to see a candidate emerge who would truly work to restore some fiscal responsibility and accountability at the federal level.

“Many of the proposals I’m seeing in the draft stimulus legislation are nothing more than poorly aimed money bombs that will do little or nothing to strengthen the American economy.” Young said.

He predicted that much of the money in the House stimulus bill would actually wind up being used to bail out state governments that have allowed large deficits to pile up, thus enabling them to avoid making the kinds of hard fiscal decisions that Indiana has already made to remain solvent in a declining economy.

“Consumer spending is down because we’ve just lost tens of trillions of dollars in housing wealth. Spending a trillion dollars of borrowed money is not going to do much to get Americans back to work or turn around the stock market,” Young said. “It will just further cheapen the dollar and enrich a handful of people who know how to take advantage of government give-aways. Americans will pay the tab in the form of greatly reduced buying power as the dollar deflates on world markets.”

Young believes that if Washington is going to spend billions on infrastructure, Congress should make sure we invest in shovel-ready projects that will make our nation more productive and lay the groundwork for future job growth and wealth creation. But, he believes that goal can be achieved for far less than the $800 billion price tag of the stimulus bill as it now stands.

“This bill alone will cost every American household $6,700 in debt, which will be paid for by our children and grandchildren,” Young said. “Yet less than $7 billion will actually be invested in infrastructure projects in 2009.”

Young believes Congress should adopt some basic habits of fiscal responsibility to end the erosion of the dollar’s buying power, lessen the debt we are passing on to future generations, and restore stability in world markets. They include:

• Don’t raise taxes. Cut them to the minimum level necessary to balance the budget.
• Don’t pour federal tax dollars into failing business models. Let failing businesses reorganize into more competitive models.
• Don’t build up the long-term debt by adding a lot of new permanent programs, or by expanding existing programs.
• Seize every opportunity to make good government programs more efficient and eliminate bad ones.
• Remove costly restrictions on development of traditional energy sources in America.
• And finally, end the practice of allowing members of Congress to keep earmark requests secret.

Todd's Full Bio can be found on the Founder Bio page.