Ernst held town hall in Mt. Pleasant

MT. PLEASANT — U.S. Senator Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, stopped by Mt. Pleasant for a town hall meeting bright and early Friday morning as part of her River to River Tour. She took the opportunity to respond to questions and comments about spending, agency competency, a combination of these two, among other topics of concern from constituents.

According to Ernst, “there are so many ways that we need to tackle our debt here in the United States.”

“I support a balanced budget amendment,” she said, though she commented that she finds it hard to gain support on this form of legislation.

“The spending we do in Congress is a small portion of the spending issue,” Ernst said. “The mandatory spending is something that we will have to wrap our arms around one way or another or we're just going to continue that clock and the debt is just going to keep growing if we don't take care of mandatory spending as well.”

Ernst defined mandatory spending as “things like Social Security, Social Security, disability that’s on autopilot.”

One attendee took the town hall as an opportunity to inform Ernst of his dissatisfaction with the customer service from the Internal Revenue Service stating, “We need qualified people on the phone at the IRS, not some eighth-grade dropout. We need somebody with an accounting degree that can actually fix those rather simple problems.”

“Customer service is lacking and actually having people with experience on the other end of the phone is really important, but you have to be able to get to them,” Ernst responded. “When you're in a situation like that with the IRS, V.A., Whatever it happens to be, just call us. Call our office or call Senator Grassley, call your representative. Just don't beat your head. Call us because we can cut through a lot of that noise for you. And if we can do that, we absolutely want to.”

Ernst later addressed other agency short comings as one constituent voiced concerns about disproportionate retirement benefits for agency workers and the general public’s social security benefits.

“Looking over the agencies and the Administrative Retirement Fund, we've got people out here that are paying taxes to support all the government workers and their fancy retirement, and they can barely even make ends meet,” a woman identified as Crystal Arthur began. “I think it's about time they don't deserve a 50% pension of their earnings… Well, maybe that's a terrible judgment for me to say, but I don't see that happening for anyone else, and social security definitely doesn’t always cover all the expenses.”

“I would like to see an offensive where we say if we're going to cut Social Security, we're going to cut agency pension, we're going to cut agency benefit,” she concluded.

“I think part of the problem is, though, that we've grown the scope of government so much. We've got all these agencies out there, and I don't even know what most of those folks do,” Ernst responded.

Ernst used the Department of Education as an example.

“That is one that I think we don't need at the federal level,” Ernst said. “What do they do?”

According to Ernst at one point this department headed up the debates around core curriculum, however, federal legislation sent most of that back to individual states early in Ernst career as a senator.

“So, what happened to all the federal workers in that Department of education in Downtown D.C. that were working on core curriculum issues?” she asked. “I thought they’d be let go, or they’d be phased out.”

“Not a single one of them were,” she said. “They’re all still there.”

“So even though we may eliminate certain programs workers never go away.” Ernst said. “They just keep growing and growing and growing. Hence the problem with pensions and everything else that we have to pay to support them.”

After an hour of fielding questions and comments Ernst thanked those in attendance for a “really healthy and robust conversation,” as she ended the event.

Comments: AnnaMarie.Ward@southeastiowaunion.com