Restoring Fiscal Responsibility & Accountability to Government
Missourians are suffering the consequences of nearly a decade of failed leadership in Washington and chronic irresponsibility on Wall Street. Lawmakers in Washington have mortgaged our children’s future and squandered taxpayers’ hard-earned money in order to give lavish tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans and pet projects to their cronies and campaign contributors. Meanwhile, Wall Street banks—flush with billions of taxpayers’ bailout money—are still awarding big bonuses to their executives while politicians in Washington sit on their hands.
If we’re going to make our economy work again, we’re going to have to stop runaway spending and reduce the deficit. All across Missouri, middle class families are struggling to stay afloat and making real sacrifices to balance their budgets each month. They trust their elected officials to be good stewards of their tax dollars—and Washington has broken that trust. Rather than coming together to forge real commonsense solutions to these challenges, long-serving politicians in Washington waste time pointing fingers and looking out for their own self-interest. That’s not public service—it’s self-service. Missourians deserve leaders who are willing to stand up and make the tough choices necessary to put this country back on track to a balanced budget.
Robin Carnahan understands the urgency of restoring accountability and fiscal responsibility to government and has a proven record of working across the aisle to get things done for Missourians. As Secretary of State, Robin helped stop financial fraud and abuse by cracking down hard on big financial firms and small time scam artists and holding them accountable for their actions and promises. Unlike the regulators in Washington who were asleep at the wheel, when Robin saw what these folks were up to, she went after them. Since 2004, she has recovered over $10 billion for tens of thousands of wronged investors and worked across party lines to change state law to better protect senior investors.
In the U.S. Senate, Robin will do what she’s always done by demanding responsibility and accountability and work to:
- Wage an all-out war on wasteful government spending: Robin will fight to ensure that taxpayers get a better return on their tax dollars. That means rooting out fraud, mismanagement and abuse, cracking down on no-bid government contracts, and putting an end to wasteful pork barrel spending projects and earmarks for corporate special interests.
- Strengthen our financial system and hold Wall Street accountable: More than a year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the bailout of AIG, it is still business-as-usual on Wall Street. Congress has yet to enact financial regulatory reform to prevent another such crisis from happening again. Robin’s experience and work as a financial regulator makes her ready to lead the charge to put real teeth into reforming our badly damaged financial system.
- Restore fiscal responsibility: Robin is also committed to moving past political bickering and partisan politics to work across the aisle and enact the kind of commonsense, bipartisan reforms—such as strong “pay as you go” rules—that helped turn massive deficits into surpluses in the 1990s. Missouri families have to balance their checkbooks, and so should our government.
