Conaway Chronicle

Travel anywhere in the world and you will quickly make a discovery: the American right to religious freedom has no equal.

This week, Americans of every faith and political persuasion expressed deep concern regarding the Obama Administration's decision to require organizations with religious affiliations to provide insurance coverage that includes contraceptives, some of which may induce abortion. 

This is a huge mistake.

The First Amendment protects our moral and religious beliefs from government encroachment.  No American should ever be compelled by their government to decide between violating their religious views or accept punishment.

This whole episode demonstrates why politicians should not be the ones to make determinations about religious beliefs and is just another reason why the deeply flawed health law needs to be replaced.  

As the Speaker said earlier this week, "[if] the President does not reverse the Department's attack on religious freedom, then the Congress, acting on behalf of the American people and the constitution we are sworn to uphold and defend, will."

The House has passed a series of reforms over the last two weeks designed to ensure taxpayer dollars are spent wisely, or not at all.  Washington’s dishonest budget gimmicks have gone on for far too long and now we need to restore honesty in budgeting. In the bills that have passed and the ones that soon will, reforms have been put forward by Republicans to establish a new barrier that prevents lawmakers from advancing spending bills without a budget and to end the accounting tricks used to conceal the true cost of deficit spending.

Budget Reforms: 

- H.R. 3581, the Budget and Accounting Transparency Act, would institute critical reforms to provide a more honest and transparent accounting of Washington’s finances by putting several “off-budget” items back on the budget.  This fix would change the way government lending programs are scored and require agencies to post their budget justifications online.

- H.R. 3521, the Expedited Legislative Line-Item Veto and Rescissions Act of 2011, would give the President the authority to recommend spending cuts in appropriations bills.  That spending, which would be devoted to deficit reduction, would then go back to the House and Senate for an up-or-down vote.

- H.R. 3578, the Baseline Reform Act, would end the practice of setting budget baselines for discretionary spending that are equal to the prior year’s budget plus inflation.  Under the Baseline Reform Act, discretionary spending would not automatically increase every year and cuts would be actual cuts, not just smaller increases in spending.

- H.R. 3582, the Pro-Growth Budgeting Act, would require the Congressional Budget Office to begin analyzing the long term economic impact of major pieces of legislation which are estimated to have a budgetary impact of more than .25 percent of GDP.  This analysis will give lawmakers a more complete assessment of the fiscal impact of legislation being considered by Congress. 

Over the next month Republicans will continue to offer and pass budget reforms aimed at restoring honesty and accountability in budgeting. At the end of March, Republicans will do something the Senate has failed to accomplish in almost three years: pass a budget. 

Despite Washington’s addiction to spending and all things related, the most important numbers released each month remain the unemployment figures. On the first Friday of every month at 8:30 a.m. the Bureau of Labor Statistics announces its estimate of how many jobs the U.S. lost and/or gained in the previous month. Last month (January) the U.S. gained an estimated 243,000 jobs and national unemployment dropped for the fifth month in a row to 8.2 percent.  

While the announcement of these new jobs is welcomed news, other aspects of the report demonstrate that Americans continue to suffer through a painfully tepid recovery made even slower by the president’s policies. 

One figure easily overlooked is the “labor force participation rate,” which illustrates the percentage of the economy that is actually working.  In January the labor force participation rate was 63.7 percent, the lowest in nearly three decades. 

Upon further investigation the BLS January shows that:

- 2,809,000 people were available to work, but were not counted as unemployed because they gave up searching.

- 1,253,000 first time job seekers were unemployed.

- 1,152,000 net jobs have been lost from February 2009 through January 2011.

While the job number is encouraging, looking deeper at the data should remind us that we still have a long way to go.  There are still Americans who are out of work and there are still Americans who are waiting on the long promised economic recovery.