Minnesota U.S. Senate candidate Kurt Bills was with a friendly crowd in Duluth Thursday afternoon when he met with the Citizen's Research Council and talked about attacking the national debt.
Bills had lunch with about 25 members of the conservative advocacy group, and he spent most of his time railing against the federal budget shortfall that has pushed the government's debt past $16 trillion.
Bills, a high school economics teacher from Rosemount, south of St. Paul, said the nation's economic system is broken because the government is overly involved. He said both Republicans and Democrats have failed to provide economic leadership in Washington and said the Democratic-controlled Senate is guilty of "fiduciary negligence" for failing to pass a legitimate budget for more than two years.
The Republican said the national debt is now larger than the nation's gross domestic product, a phenomenon he says is dragging on the economy. He predicted another major recession within two years that "will make this recession look like a bump in the road."
Bills said government must move aside to let the private sector grow the nation out of economic doldrums and that the government needs to zero-out its budget and start from scratch. As a teacher, Bills said he's seen waste within the federal Department of Education. The agency sponsors some 209 separate programs to push science technology, math and engineering in schools but has failed to account for success from any of them, he said.
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A freshman state lawmaker who won the Republican primary for U.S. Senate last month, Bills is facing popular incumbent DFLer Amy Klobuchar in the Nov. 6 election. Bills is considered an underdog in the race, trailing Klobuchar in name recognition, fundraising and polls.
But Bills is playing off that underdog status, saying the 2012 election is not about Republicans vs. Democrats but "American vs. Washington," and that the only way to solve the government's economic crisis is to "send people to Washington who have studied this stuff."
Klobuchar's campaign countered Thursday that she backed the Budget Control Act that will, if followed to fruition, cut $2.3 trillion from the national debt within 10 years. But her supporters noted that, unlike Bills who favors all cuts to move toward a balanced budget, Klobuchar supports some increase in revenue and not just program cuts. Klobuchar supports restoring federal income tax rates on people with incomes over $250,000 to the levels paid in the 1990s, before the so-called Bush tax cuts were enacted.
The Klobuchar campaign noted that she was part of the bipartisan group of 45 senators to get a balanced debt reduction plan through Congress and one of just 14 senators who fought for the creation of the Fiscal Commission to oversee budget-balancing action.
