Washington, D.C. – Following are statements by Thomas Schatz, President of Citizens Against Government Waste, reacting to the President’s State of the Union Address on January 19, 1999.

STATEMENT 1

With his State of the Union Address tonight, the President fired the starting gun on the annual Budget Process.  In a desperate attempt to project an image of effectiveness, the President is passing out government programs left and right.  He pandered to every political constituency, hoping they would return the favor by keeping his ratings high.

The President has offered very specific ideas on how to spend tens of billions of dollars on everything from bicycle trails to after-school programs.  Yet he follows his usual pattern of being much less than forthright about where he plans to find the spending cuts to offset the cost of these new programmatic goodies. 

Congress probably will be more than happy to hop on the President’s pork-barrel bandwagon.  The real scandal in Washington is not the partisan division over impeachment, but the bipartisan collusion to spend as much money as possible.

STATEMENT 2

Tonight during the State of the Union Address, the President made many promises, but didn’t explain exactly how he was going to pay for all of these new programs that he plans to introduce in his new budget.  The President has a rather relaxed approach to the meaning of words, one of those being “surplus.”  He keeps talking about how much of a surplus we have to spend, but a true calculation of the state of the budget reveals that, rather than wallowing in a surplus, the federal government continues to face a $46 billion deficit in Fiscal Year 2000.  The only way to come up with a surplus is to steal money from Social Security.  So much for saving that program for the next generation.