An open letter to the United States Congress:

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This week, you will continue to vote on multi-hundred billion dollar appropriations bills that continue to put the budget into the red and keep taxpayers on the hook.  At the same time, the Obama Administration this week announced it was putting off revealing the updated over-spending (aka "deficit") numbers for this fiscal year until the August recess.

The clear intent is to neither impede the march toward high-tax government medicine, nor to give the Congress any pause in writing more checks on the taxpayer account.  Reports indicate that the spending-over-taxes for 2009 may approach $2 trillion.  This is a vast sum when one considers that it’s over four times last year’s level, and is equal to all of federal spending as recently as 2002!

As such, Congress simply doesn’t have all the facts to proceed.  It’s unconscionable to be voting on bills totaling hundreds of billions of dollars each without knowing how much of an over-spending problem we have.

Therefore, I am calling on the Congress to suspend all legislative activity that involves appropriating taxpayer dollars until the Obama Administration sees fit to release its latest estimate of the over-spending amount for 2009.

Sincerely,

Grover Norquist

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