did you know that congress ......

The House’s decision not to pursue a budget resolution comes as the Senate has been struggling to get its companion measure to the floor. And the politics of the moment are a far cry from last year, when the House and Senate easily passed Obama’s first budget on the president’s 100th day in office. The budget measure last year did not attract any GOP support.

Hoyer is seeking a new tone on how to handle the nation’s record debt.

“This is a remarkable moment in political history — a time when our creeping fiscal danger of our $9 trillion of publicly held debt troubles Americans as much as the prospect of the most brutal attacks on our country,” Hoyer will say. “The real question is how we respond... There’s the easy way — glib slogans about spending, solutions that are more about winning political power than confronting the scope of the problem, and answers borrowed from decades-old dogma instead of from a hard look at reality.”

The “right way” Hoyer envisions, however, does involve a continued separation of short-term and structural budget deficits and a careful avoidance of “overreacting to short-term deficits while we’re still feeling the effects of recession.”

“If ‘out-of-control spending’ refers to the Recovery Act and other jobs programs that are responsible for more than 2 million jobs and only a small fraction of our deficit, I’d ask what the alternatives were,” the speech reads. “Whether we are spending or cutting taxes, creating jobs in a recession means adding to the deficit in the short term.”