SALTER – Miss. congressional races should focus on nations budget
The 1st District features what state and national analysts see as a “pick ‘em” race between incumbent first-term incumbent U.S. Rep. Travis Childers, D-Booneville and Republican challenger state Sen. Alan Nunnelee of Tupelo. There are a pack of minor party and independent candidates in that race as well whose mere presence in the race could change the outcome. That’s how close some think the Childers-Nunnelee race will be.
As the congressional elections prepare to begin the stretch run after the full-contact campaigning at the Neshoba County Fair later this month, voters should seriously consider a presentation made by a bipartisan presidential commission on the nation’s debt and deficits at the National Governors Association meeting Sunday in Boston.
The co-chairmen of the commission — former Clinton administration White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles and former Wyoming Republican U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming — told the nation’s governors that current budgetary trends constituted “a cancer that will destroy the country from within” unless Congress and the White House takes action.
The basic premise of the Bowles-Simpson presentation to the governor’s association was that present federal revenue is consumed by the obligations of three federal entitlement programs: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
“The rest of the federal government, including fighting two wars, homeland security, education, art, culture, you name it, veterans — the whole rest of the discretionary budget is being financed by China and other countries,” Simpson said.
Desoto Times
Sid Salter
6/16/10
Magnolia Tribune
