The main message at Wednesday evening’s College Republican meeting was that Democrats are driving the United States in the wrong direction.
Congressman Pete Sessions, a Republican from Texas’s 32nd District, spoke at the meeting in the Varsity of the Hughes-Trigg Student Center, discussing a host of issues.
Sessions is also the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee.
The economy took up a good portion of Sessions’ discussion. Using Japan as a cautionary tale, he argued against government interference in the free-enterprise system.
“Japan in the mid-80s had 16 of the 20 largest banks in the world,” he said.
“They had a savings rate of 23 percent. Japan had the finest educational system in the world—or so they said. And Japan had the best technology platform of anywhere in the world.”
But then, according to Sessions, “something happened.”
“Their government co-opted the free enterprise system to be partners because somebody thought it was good, because things were going so great, that we need to help the government out too,” he said.
Sessions pointed to the nicknamed “Lost Decade,” when Japan saw its economy suffer.
He explained that Japan has had 17 years of economic decline since then.
Sessions also lambasted the Obama administration’s budget plan.
“The facts of the case are real simple. They are doubling and tripling the debt of this country,” he said.
“If we push a 2011 budget the way the president wants it, the [budget] Speaker Pelosi wants, we will be above Greece with the debt to GDP ratio within eight years.”
Due to the size of our economy, Sessions said this “would mean economic calamity for the entire world.”
Sessions also chided Democrats for not growing the economy.
“The facts of the case are now some twenty months later, our GDP growth for the year has now been downgraded from 2.6 to 1.6,” he said.
According to Sessions, it will take 74 years to double the economy under the Democrats’ plan.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, this is not a successful way to have to run a country,” he said. “And I’m trying to get you to think about how important this is, about how deceptive people are.”
