[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 116 (Wednesday, August 17, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: August 17, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                     THE BUDGET SHOULD BE BALANCED

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Georgia [Mr. Kingston] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, the budget should be balanced, the 
treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the 
arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the 
assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed, lest Rome become 
bankrupt.
  These words were written by Cicero in Rome in 63 B.C. Yet today they 
still are instructive to the United States Government. And I would like 
to tell you that I am an intellectual erudite who reads these kinds of 
things in his spare time, rather than Michael Crighton and Tom Clancy, 
but I do not want to say that.
  This letter was sent to me by a man named Thomas McCaw, of Corpus 
Christi, TX. And why a gentleman from Texas would be writing a 
Representative from Georgia who he cannot vote for and really in most 
cases letters like this get thrown away, at first puzzled me.
  Then when I think about it, I think about the public debt and the 
country.
  You know, we are elected from one district, but we are not elected to 
represent that district only. We are elected, all 435 of us, to 
represent the United States of America. And the public debt is 
everyone's business. There are 435 of us who must have a plan, 
individually or collectively, or in a unified approach, to balance this 
debt and do something about it.
  Now, Mr. McCaw in his letter said the Roman Empire took four 
centuries after Cicero's prediction to become bankrupt. With modern 
communications, the USA will require less than four decades. You can 
stop this by matching outgo with income, paying off the debt, 
eliminating your excess expenditures, and eliminating all foreign 
expenditures.
  Well, of course, one of the things we debate about is how we spend 
money and what is excessive and what is not. I think if you go back to 
his first point, matching the outgo with the income, one of the things 
that I have learned as we debate the budget and the debt is that in 
1980, the total revenues were about $500 billion. Today I believe they 
are about one million. During that time, unfortunately, we 
have outspent the revenues every year, including this one, and this one 
we are going into. Certainly during that period of time, there were 
Republicans in control of the White House, but the Democrats were in 
control of Congress. The Republicans and the Democrats had joint 
control of the Senate.

  So anybody who says it is a Ronald Reagan legacy or it is a Bill 
Clinton phenomenon is fooling his or herself. This is an American 
problem. It has been going on in a bipartisan fashion now ever since I 
believe 1969, when we had the last balanced budget under President 
Richard Nixon.
  We need to deal with this thing. We are dealing right now with crime, 
it is front and center stage, health care is center stage. But as we 
make these decisions, we have to say, OK, the crime bill is good or 
bad, but we also always need to ask who is going to pay for it and how.
  Health care, a lot of proposals are on the table right now. Some of 
them call for massive new taxes, some of them call for cuts in 
Medicare. But they all call for new spending.
  As we look at $4.4 trillion and realize that each year we have a 
deficit we are adding to that debt, we need to do the responsible thing 
and make sure that the centerpiece of every bill that we look at, every 
piece of legislation, is how is it going to affect the deficit and how 
is it going to affect the debt.
  So as we have these important debates going right now, Mr. Speaker, I 
thought it was important for us to be mindful of our debt, and the 
people like Mr. McCaw from Corpus Christi, TX, and the fact that I have 
589,000 people in the district that I represent is important, but what 
I guess is more important is the 260 million across America that will 
be paying that debt, either by being forced to or by default or 
voluntarily. But we as Members of Congress need to take the lead.

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