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Perugino: Spending sets new record
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The runaway train has again picked up speed fueled by government's out of control spending. You certainly won't read this in the major media this week.

In the month of February, as published by the Congressional Budget Office, the federal government incurred a gargantuan, mind damaging $232 billion deficit. This is the largest monthly deficit on record. The CBO also projected that in that month Congress spent $335 billion and took in revenues of $103 billion to create a monthly deficit of $232 billion.

Harry Reid and the Democrat controlled Senate failed to produce a budget for three years as required by law and refused to allow the budget produced by Paul Ryan and passed by the House to even go to the floor for a vote. Who needs a budget to measure spending levels and to consult while making financial decisions?

Remember that in this leap year February has 29 days. Could that one extra day have caused this catastrophe? Sadly no. This administration has reached unexcelled heights in its ability to spend our money.

Stop for a minute and think about what it means to spend $335 billion in just 29 days. That equates to $11.5 billion per day and $480 million per hour.

We should be reaping the benefits of budget reduction through reined in government spending required by the Budget Control Act passed seven months ago. How's that working for us?

At a time when tax receipts are increasing again (corporate tax receipts are up 56 percent), we should not be racking up such high deficits. Hence, it is incontrovertibly clear that we don't have a revenue problem; we have a spending problem, most prominently, an entitlement problem.

While some figures show spending for the year down a few points, that reduction is entirely due to an accounting shift based on which monthly federal entitlement payments were sent. So ultimately, we have not cut a dime in spending. The CBO notes, spending has actually gone up in some areas.

The CBO has just this week announced that the published cost of Obamacare of $900 billion is not correct and the actual cost will be closer to $1.7 trillion.

This summer we will witness highly controversial debates full of drama and opinion in Congress over the FY13 budget and the level of discretionary spending. Granted we must certainly reduce discretionary spending, but if we have the slightest hope of reducing the national debt, we must also address reducing mandatory spending as well.