WASHINGTON, November 4 (RIA Novosti) – US federal budget will face spending reduction in case Republicans get the majority of the votes in the Senate at the upcoming congressional elections, experts told RIA Novosti on Monday.
"That is an opportunity for Republicans to step in and start to make some trims to entitlement programs, start to make some reductions of overall spending," Brandon Arnold, Executive Vice President of National Taxpayers Union, said.
Arnold explained that the majority of American federal spending is now allocated to entitlement programs and national debt repayment. He added that "the real problem is social security, Medicare and Medicaid as those programs are not structured in a financially sustainable way."
"The size of the [US] government debt will certainly continue to grow, it's just the matter of the rate at which it increases. We can limit the rate of growth, but we cannot reverse it politically speaking," Arnold said, commenting on American national debt.
Julie Borowski, a policy analyst from Washington, D.C. based libertarian group FreedomWorks, told RIA Novosti that if Republicans keep the House of Representatives and control the Senate, they can effectively pass spending cut bills and "deliver them to Obama's desk instead of being stalled in the Senate."
"Many of the bills, such as the 'Audit the Fed' legislation [a bill to audit the Federal Reserve System], are common sense and it would be a bad political move for Obama not to sign," Borowski stressed.
"The Senate Steering Committee, led by Senator Mike Lee will become the guiding 'think-tank' for the GOP and develop ideas to slash the budget and reduce the national debt," Borowski said.
On November 4, Americans will elect 36 senators, 435 congressmen, 36 governors and 46 state legislatures in what is called midterm elections as they occur in the middle of the sitting president's four-year term.
Last October the US government went under shutdown for over two weeks because the Democratic Senate and the Republican House of Representatives could not agree on a bill to appropriate funds for 2014. According to Standard & Poor's estimate, the shutdown cost $24 billion to the American economy.
