Op-Eds and Blogs

WASHINGTON D.C. (WTAQ) - The nation’s employers added more jobs in July than in any month since February. But the unemployment rate still edged up by one-tenth-of-a-percent, to 8.3 percent. U.S. Senate Republican Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said the jobless rate was troubling and, “There’s a very real danger the United States will fall back into recession.” The Labor Department said 163,000 jobs were added last month – enough to keep up with population growth, but not enough to keep the jobless rate from falling.

A bipartisan group of senators led by South Carolina Republican Jim DeMint introduced the Pay for Printing Act Thursday, which would require senators to pay for celebratory “simple resolutions” with money from their own budgets. During the 112th Congress, the Senate has already passed over 350 simple resolutions, and introduced over a 100 more. They have mostly been symbolic, feel-good declarations including, as The Daily Caller reported in June: “National Chess Day,” “National Safe Digging Month,” “Year of Water,” “National Inventors Month,” “Collector Car Appreciation Day,” and “The Year of the Family Caregiver.” DeMint’s office points out that each resolution page costs an estimated $1,200. A Daily Caller investigation in June revealed that the 318 simple resolutions passed since January 2011 cost taxpayers $381,600. Dozens of additional simple resolutions have been passed since then, and their total price tag in this Congress now amounts to more than $400,000.

The federal government needs to be able to protect itself from cyber attacks before it regulates security standards for private industry, two senators said Tuesday, echoing a consistent theme of opposition to the Cybersecurity Act of 2012. In an op-ed for Politico, Republican Sens. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin wrote that the federal government needs to be able to meet the same cybersecurity obligations it expects to place upon the private sector. “In 2011, incidents on federal networks went up again — this time by 5 percent. At the same time, only 18 percent of federal agencies’ nearly $76 billion information technology budget was spent on security,” they wrote. “Of that amount, 76 percent of IT security costs at nondefense agencies were spent feeding a bloated bureaucracy.”

<b>Originally printed in Politico, July 31st, 2012 </b> There is widespread agreement across America that cybersecurity is an urgent national priority and the federal government needs to play a major role. The threat of a cyberattack is real, and its consequences could prove devastating to our economic and national security. Effective action cannot come too soon. Any solution to cybersecurity must allow the private sector, which owns 85 percent of our nation’s critical infrastructure, the freedom to use all tools at its disposal to protect against cyber intrusions. Business owners understand the need to protect themselves in the cyber domain and are devoting considerable resources to do so. Industry is right to expect that any Senate legislation will complement their current efforts.