Pray for sound thinking by our legislators regarding our fiscal budget process. Let’s cover Senator Lankford, a prayerful, committed Christian, in concerted prayer as he tries to bring change to Washington and the halls of Congress. Share your prayer with him HERE.

“For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’” (Luke 14:28–30)

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In the wee hours of the morning of March 23, the Senate passed a 2,232-page, $1.3 trillion budget-busting spending bill barely 24 hours after it was introduced to the public. The bill provides funding for the 2018 fiscal year that began six months ago. Members did not even have time to read and digest the bill, let alone debate and amend its provisions.

Unfortunately, this unseemly process of dropping a take-it-or-leave-it spending bill right before the deadline is not an outlier. It has become the norm.

The current structure under the Congressional Budget Act, created after Watergate in 1974, was designed to create a more transparent budget and appropriations process. But in reality, it created a budgeting process so incredibly difficult to work through, it’s only been done correctly four times in 45 years. To say the budget process is broken is an understatement. It’s time for a change….

Currently, there is a debate unfolding about how to provide certainty to the Dreamers, a group of young, undocumented children who were illegally brought to the United States through no fault of their own. It is an important national discussion that magnifies the American values of fairness and the rule of law.

The same can be said for an entire generation of young Americans, who, through no fault of their own, will foot the bill for the massive promises that they had no say in creating. If we do not get on top of our nation’s finances, the idea of the American dream will be squelched for generations of Americans….

This coming year, our annual deficit will be the largest peacetime, non-recession deficit in American history. It is also the lowest projected deficit in our foreseeable future. Ten thousand Americans are turning (Pewresearch.org) 65 every day. The number of Americans age 65 and older will double from 41 million to 82 million between 2010 and 2040.

This is an unprecedented demographic wave that will — absent major reforms — wash away our government finances. The gap between what the federal government has promised and the amount that we will collect in taxes is a gargantuan $111 trillion (USdebtclock.org). That is $923,000 per taxpayer or $30,000 per year for the next 30 years. Each….

President Trump campaigned on Making America Great Again. It’s time that we all start working to Keep America Great for the next generation. Hopefully, the Select Committee on Budget and Appropriations Reforms can produce a bipartisan common sense solution that begins to solve our debt crisis.(Excerpts from James Lankford and Tom Coburn’s article in The Washington Times – James Lankford is a U.S. senator from Oklahoma. His predecessor, Tom Coburn, a physician, represented Oklahoma in the U.S. Senate for 10 years and is the founder of Pursuit.)