A Conversation with Pat Tiberi: The Sunbury News, Novermber 21, 2011

The Sunbury News

November 17, 2011

Con­gress­man Pat Tiberi was home recently. It was Elec­tion Day and an ideal time to touch base with con­stituents, dis­cuss their con­cerns and also let them know what is hap­pen­ing in Wash­ing­ton. Dur­ing his visit, he took time out of a busy sched­ule for an inter­view with The Sun­bury News.

Asked what are the most com­mon issues he hears about from his con­stituents on a daily basis, Tiberi said the econ­omy and jobs, and the lack of jobs needed to jump start the economy.

“Since Pres­i­dent Obama passed his stim­u­lus bill back in 2009 we’ve had 36 months of unem­ploy­ment above 8 per­cent, and most of those months above 9 per­cent,” Tiberi said. “When he passed the stim­u­lus bill, he said we had to pass the bill so unem­ploy­ment wouldn’t go over 8 per­cent, but it’s been over 8 per­cent the entire time since then. That shows us that the stim­u­lus bill didn’t work.”

Tiberi said what the econ­omy needs is the pri­vate sec­tor to start hir­ing again in a sus­tain­able way; but he’s hear­ing that pri­vate sec­tor employ­ers want the tax code fixed and a less­en­ing of the reg­u­la­tory burden.

“I hap­pen to be work­ing on try­ing to fix the tax code, and mak­ing the tax code and rules for employ­ers and indi­vid­u­als sim­pler, fairer and pro-growth,” Tiberi said. “Pro-growth, mean­ing a tax code that encour­ages job growth and also encour­ages invest­ment. It’s hard to get there when you have a pres­i­dent who has very dif­fer­ent views on the tax code and the reg­u­la­tory envi­ron­ment; but I’m now con­vinced that our econ­omy is not going to improve until employ­ers see some relief on the reg­u­la­tory side and some cer­tainty in the tax code.”

Tiberi said 15 bills are stuck in the sen­ate that deal with tax reform and job cre­ation, but Sen­ate Major­ity Leader Harry Reid, in Tiberi’s words, will not pick them up.

“We’re going to keep the pres­sure on, but I hear it every day, peo­ple are dis­cour­aged with what’s hap­pen­ing in Wash­ing­ton,” Tiberi said. “You still have the hous­ing mar­ket in the dumps and employ­ers who are not will­ing to expand. Even employ­ers that have the abil­ity to expand, large employ­ers sit­ting on cash because they don’t feel good about the econ­omy and about invest­ing that money and hir­ing peo­ple. They’re say­ing they are not going to invest cap­i­tal until they see some cer­tainty in the tax code and on the reg­u­la­tory side.”

Tiberi said the econ­omy is in a hold­ing pat­tern right now sim­ply because Pres­i­dent Obama will not lis­ten to peo­ple who hire peo­ple; but that type of prac­ti­cal dia­logue is what could open a path­way to a sound eco­nomic recovery.

“But right now there isn’t a lot of good sig­nals for a quick recov­ery,” Tiberi said. “And if you look at his­tory, if you have employ­ment hov­er­ing over 8 per­cent, can a pres­i­dent get re-elected in the kind of a malaise we’re in right now? So I would think he would want to try to do some things that job cre­ators are ask­ing for, rather than a stim­u­lus, which didn’t work before and will drive us a half tril­lion dol­lars deeper into debt as well.”

Asked about the U.S. Armed Forces with­drawal from Iraq by the end of this year, and from Afghanistan next year, Tiberi said the with­drawal itself is not a prob­lem, but the way the cur­rent admin­is­tra­tion has cho­sen to exit those two coun­tries is troublesome.

“There’s a right way and a wrong way to do things,” Tiberi said. “Because of the way Pres­i­dent Obama has cho­sen to leave Iraq and Afghanistan, we face some very chal­leng­ing months ahead. The pres­i­dent is sig­nal­ing to the ene­mies of both Amer­ica and our allies in Iraq and Afghanistan that we are leav­ing. He’s announc­ing it, and that’s the last thing we want to do through­out this process. Obvi­ously, we are going to leave, but let’s do it in a method­i­cal and smart way that doesn’t put our troops and coali­tion troops at risk, and that doesn’t put the alliance at risk.”

Tiberi said he under­stands what Pres­i­dent Obama is doing; that he’s enter­ing an elec­tion year and he’s try­ing to keep a cam­paign promise he made in 2008.

“Pres­i­dent Obama is mak­ing a polit­i­cal deci­sion rather than what we all hoped would be a pol­icy deci­sion based upon what com­man­ders on the ground are telling him, and on how to with­draw with­out giv­ing a roadmap to our ene­mies,” Tiberi said. “Some peo­ple say: Yah, I’m glad we’re leav­ing; but the big­ger issue is not that we’re leav­ing, but the man­ner in which we’re leav­ing. Does it cause us more long-term dam­age with respect to our foreign-policy and how we’re looked at, not just in that region but how we’re looked at around the world?”

Tiberi said Afghanistan was on the radar before Sept. 11, 2001; that there were pre-9/11 con­gres­sional com­mit­tee meet­ings about the county’s law­less soci­ety, and how it had become a train­ing ground for Mus­lim fun­da­men­tal­ist extrem­ists intent on attack­ing tar­gets in the west.

“We became one of those tar­gets,” Tiberi said. “What we don’t want is for that to hap­pen again. But it cer­tainly is some­thing most extrem­ists will look at if the president’s vision is accom­plished in both Iraq and Afghanistan and we are out. The Islamist extrem­ists aren’t going away, and this will cer­tainly be looked at as a vic­tory in their minds.”

Tiberi said leav­ing Iraq and Afghanistan would not end the War of Ter­ror; that extrem­ists would still be intent on attack­ing Amer­ica on Amer­i­can soil.

“We haven’t had a ter­ror­ist attack here for a long time, and many peo­ple think that we won’t, but that’s just putting your head in the sand,” Tiberi said. “We’ve had over 100 attempts over the last 10 years accord­ing to the Home­land Secu­rity folks. The most recent case that made the news was the plot to kill a Saudi ambas­sador. Some might say in that he isn’t an Amer­i­can; but you put a bomb in a restau­rant in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. or New York to kill the Saudi ambas­sador, how many Amer­i­cans get killed?”

Tiberi said the plot to kill the Saudi ambas­sador was foiled by a pure stroke of luck.

“Good intel­li­gence work? Even the FBI will tell you we were for­tu­nate that one of the peo­ple the ter­ror­ists con­tacted in the Mex­i­can crime fam­ily hap­pened to be a DEA under­cover agent,” Tiberi said. “How lucky were we that they con­tacted the one guy who was a DEA under­cover agent?”

Tiberi said in addi­tion to luck, suc­cess at stop­ping ter­ror­ist attacks on Amer­i­can soil is the result of ramped up intel­li­gence from the FBI, Home­land secu­rity, the CIA and the abil­ity of all intel­li­gence agen­cies to com­mu­ni­cate with each other more effectively.

“But the other side is not back­ing down, and they will not back down when we leave Iraq and Afghanistan,” Tiberi said. “We have to real­ize we are still in the fight against rad­i­cal Islamic terrorism.”

Tiberi also talked about the national debt, and the bipar­ti­san super-committee that is tasked with reduc­ing debt spending.

“The national debt is head­ing towards $15 tril­lion; our annual in the red spend­ing since Obama became pres­i­dent has aver­aged over $1 tril­lion a year,” Tiberi said. “We have this joint select committee’s that sup­posed to report in a cou­ple of weeks on sav­ing at least $1 tril­lion over the next 10 years, and they’re strug­gling to come up with a con­sen­sus. The six Democ­rats want to raise taxes, the six Repub­li­cans want to cut spend­ing, and it appears a com­pro­mise is elusive.”

Tiberi said there are two types of fed­eral spend­ing. Manda­tory spend­ing hap­pens auto­mat­i­cally, it’s on autopi­lot, and dis­cre­tionary spend­ing which Con­gress approves every year.

“If you look back to 1960 when John F. Kennedy got elected, and you look at today, the changes in fed­eral spend­ing are eye-popping,” Tiberi said. “When Kennedy was pres­i­dent less than one-third of fed­eral gov­ern­ment spend­ing was manda­tory. Today, that less than one-third has become two-thirds. It’s flipped. Manda­tory spend­ing is now two-thirds and dis­cre­tionary has become less than one-third; and that means Con­gress has less con­trol over money going out in fed­eral spend­ing on a year-to-year basis, which makes it harder to con­trol the deficit, unless you deal with the growth of manda­tory spending.”

Tiberi said the two biggest manda­tory spend­ing pro­grams that are grow­ing rapidly are Med­ic­aid and Medicare. Medicare is directly related to demo­graph­ics, he said; in just the last 50 years the life expectancy has jumped up a decade.

“In 1950, there were fewer than 2,500 Amer­i­cans who lived to be 100 or over,” Tiberi said. “In 2010, the lat­est cen­sus num­bers, over 75,000 peo­ple in Amer­ica live to be 100 or over. And that’s true of every age group — 90 and over a lot more than 1950, 80 and over a lot more than 1950 — and that’s a good thing, peo­ple are liv­ing longer. Mod­ern med­i­cine has a lot to do with that, but that’s expen­sive. We have tests now that we didn’t have, treat­ments we didn’t have even 20 years ago, med­i­cines we didn’t have, and those con­tinue to be improved. But there’s a cost to all of that; there’s a cost to peo­ple liv­ing longer.”

Tiberi said cor­po­rate retire­ment sys­tems and Social Secu­rity were never designed for peo­ple to retire in their early 60s and go on to live longer than they actu­ally paid into the systems.

“Social Secu­rity, Medicare, PERS, what­ever sys­tem it is, the sys­tem was never designed for our mod­ern length of life,” Tiberi said. “In addi­tion to that, because of the baby boomers, demo­graph­i­cally you have fewer peo­ple work­ing and pay­ing into the sys­tem than recip­i­ents. With fewer peo­ple pay­ing in, more peo­ple being paid out to, and in addi­tion to that peo­ple liv­ing longer — you have an actu­ar­ial night­mare. If we don’t deal with it, it’s going to be a legacy we leave our chil­dren that none of us will be proud of.”

Tiberi said with life expectancy con­tin­u­ing to creep up and advance­ments in mod­ern med­i­cine, we could be look­ing at a child in someone’s arms today who will be alive in 2100.

“We have to think about how the deci­sions we make or don’t make today will impact their lives,” Tiberi said. “We don’t want them to look back and say this gen­er­a­tion didn’t pre­pare our coun­try for this. We want them to look back and say: They had some tough times, but they turned it around and we’re glad that they did. And that’s what some of these tough deci­sions we have to make today are all about.”

Quotable Tiberi:

On enti­tle­ment: Over the last cou­ple of decades Amer­ica has become like we can have all cake; there’s a grow­ing feel­ing of enti­tle­ment. We have about half of our Amer­i­cans who don’t pay fed­eral income taxes today. That’s a prob­lem; it’s the high­est ever in our nation’s his­tory. Cer­tainly there are peo­ple who lost their jobs, the high unem­ploy­ment rate, but we also have peo­ple who work and don’t pay fed­eral income tax; and about half of Amer­i­cans, not nec­es­sar­ily the same ones, get a check from the fed­eral gov­ern­ment. That’s utterly unsus­tain­able; we have to change that because we can­not con­tinue at that pace.

On Fair Tax: I think the two best ways to go is you get rid of the income tax and have a national con­sump­tion tax, called a sales tax, or you have a flat tax. Repub­li­cans are divided. Even for a cou­ple of years when we had con­trol of the Sen­ate, the House and the Bush pres­i­dency, we couldn’t get enough votes to change the tax code because you had those who said fair tax or noth­ing, and those who said flat tax or noth­ing. It’s inter­est­ing that advo­cates of both shared a com­mon theme: it’s sim­ple, every­body pays the same, you could put it on a post­card if it’s a flat tax, you don’t even have to have an IRS if it’s a fair tax because it’s con­sump­tion based. But I wouldn’t want to go to a sales tax until we first elim­i­nate the income tax. If you have both, it’s just going to be a big rev­enue grab by lib­eral big spenders who want to see both.

On Pres­i­dent Obama: The dif­fi­culty today is we have a divided gov­ern­ment. We’re try­ing to push the pres­i­dent away from his lib­eral lean­ings and get us to live within our means as a fed­eral gov­ern­ment. What makes it even more dif­fi­cult is the pres­i­dent is now in full cam­paign mode. It will all come to a head next Novem­ber dur­ing the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, but I don’t see how he can run again on a plat­form of hope and change. I don’t think any­body feels bet­ter off than they did in 2008.

On alle­ga­tions against Her­man Cain: If you’re run­ning for pres­i­dent and know something’s going to come out with the two sex­ual harass­ment set­tle­ments, you think he would be bet­ter pre­pared. For some­body run­ning for com­man­der in chief, the high­est posi­tion in the coun­try, an office filled with cri­sis man­age­ment, I find it quite sur­pris­ing that he was not bet­ter pre­pared to answer those alle­ga­tions. It makes you won­der about com­pe­tency when some­one can­not respond to some­thing that they know is going to come up.

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