In the News

Rep. Kevin Hern tells Tulsa Chamber deficits should matter again

Randy Krehbiel, Tulsa World

Tulsa, OK, April 14, 2022
There was a time when deficits mattered.

First District Congressman Kevin Hern thinks they are beginning to again.

Since arriving in Washington three years ago, Hern has angled for influence on Republican fiscal policy. On Thursday, speaking to the Tulsa Regional Chamber, he sketched the outlines of a plan to balance the federal budget in seven years.

Asked later if anybody in Congress is really willing to do that, given that it seems to have grown used to simultaneously cutting taxes and spending more without serious consequences.

Hern said yes.

“It’s not just Republicans,” he said. “We’re actually seeing many Democrats saying so. That’s what Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema are saying. That’s why, in the House, bills are not hitting the floor as fast as President Biden would like.”

In the evenly divided U.S. Senate, Democrats Manchin of West Virginia and Sinema of Arizona have applied the brakes to some of their party’s more ambitious spending proposals. That hasn’t made them popular with some in their own party, but they do harken back to days when Congress tethered revenue to spending, however tenuously.

But almost 20 years ago, Republican Vice President Dick Cheney argued for tax cuts by saying that, politically, at least, deficits don’t matter. More recently, liberal economic theorists have promoted the idea that deficits shouldn’t matter fiscally, either.

Combined with the Great Recession of 2007-08 and the COVID-19 pandemic, the result has been rapidly growing national debt.

Hern, sounding decidedly old-fashioned, said Thursday, “We can’t keep borrowing at this rate.”

But he also acknowledged that the federal government can’t stop borrowing, at least not for awhile.

“We have to look long-term,” he said. “It would do too much harm to too many people to make these changes quickly.”

Hern mainly talks in terms of restraining expenditures but also says revenue will have to grow. An expanding economy could account for some of that, but he said ending some “extenders” — basically, tax breaks — is also part of the formula.

While acknowledging a strong economy currently, Hern warned of a recession as the money supply is tightened in order to rein in inflation.

Not surprisingly, Hern blamed the current inflation on Biden, and especially the COVID-19 relief measures enacted over the past year. He acknowledged that food and fuel prices have been affected by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but he blamed Biden, at least in part, for that, too.

In a different vein, Hern talked at some length about cyber attacks from both outside and inside the United States.

“There have been some really, really big cyber attacks here in Tulsa in the last 24 months that, if you didn’t know the person, you wouldn’t know they’d been hit (and) paid $3-$5 million in ransom,” Hern said.

Hern said the FBI has told him, “’Mr. Congressman, we don’t have time to chase them down there’s so many of them.’ The businesses are on their own. … You can’t be too cautious on this.”