[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 13 (Monday, January 23, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H480-H481]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


              QUOTES FROM THE PAST SUPPORT BALANCED BUDGET

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 4, 1995, the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Hoke] is recognized 
during morning business for 5 minutes.
  Mr. HOKE. Mr. Speaker, we are getting to the point in the balanced 
budget debate where the volume is being turned up, the heat is being 
turned up, we are starting to hear a lot of gnashing of teeth and 
beating of chests and wailing and wringing of hands, and I thought that 
it might be a good idea at this point to remind ourselves of the words 
of George Santayana who said that those who refuse to study history are 
condemned to repeat it, especially as we hear, and I talked last week a 
little bit, about the new species on the floor this year in Congress 
called the Metoobut.
  The Metoobuts are known by their talking about a particularly 
positive and popular Republican principle, for example, in this case 
the balanced budget amendment, which the people of this country have 
said overwhelmingly that they want this Congress to enact, and they 
will say, ``We absolutely have to have a balanced budget amendment, I 
support it completely, it's the best thing in the world, it's the 
greatest thing since sliced bread, but,'' and then launch into 55 
reasons why we ought to have it maybe in the next millennium but not in 
this one.
  I thought it might be instructive if we could just look a little bit 
at what other people in other times have said about the ability to 
spend the national treasury.
  Going backward quite a way, I thought maybe we could start with the 
Roman statesman Cicero when he spoke in the Roman Forum in 63 B.C. 
Listen closely, because this has particularly special relevance to 
today, 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.

  Then we move closer to our own era, and we find a gentleman named 
Alexander Fraser Tyler who wrote about the decline and fall of the 
Athenian Republic. He was a Scotsman, a scholar, a historian and a 
professor, and he wrote this book in 1805. He said that a democracy 
``can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote 
themselves money from the Public Treasury. From that moment on, the 
majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits 
from the Public Treasury with a result that a democracy always 
collapses over loose fiscal policy always followed by dictatorship. The 
average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. 
These nations have progressed through the following sequence.'' This is 
all according to Mr. Tyler:

     From bondage to spiritual faith;
     From spiritual faith to great courage;
     From courage to liberty;
     From liberty to abundance;
     From abundance to selfishness;
     From selfishness to complacency;
     From complacency to apathy;
     From apathy to dependency;
     From dependency back into bondage.

  Mr. Tyler's assessment is not very positive and I think I will take 
issue with his notion that every democracy will collapse over loose 
fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. That is one of the reasons 
that we are not going to allow that to happen here at this time in the 
history, in the life cycle of our own Republic.
  Let us go back to what one of our own Founding Fathers said, one of 
the greatest Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, in 1789. He had one 
reservation about the Constitution, this document that he personally 
had had so much to do with authoring. He said, and this is 1789 he 
wrote this, ``If there is one omission I fear in the document called 
the Constitution, it is that we did not restrict the power of the 
government to borrow money.''
  That is what our balanced budget amendment is all about. It is about 
requiring a supermajority, a three-fifths vote of the House, in order 
to borrow more money. The operative working section of this 
constitutional amendment is the requirement that 60 percent, that is 
the restriction right there, 60 percent of the House of Representatives 
and the Senate must vote in order to pass a raising of the debt 
service, or the debt limit, the ceiling on the debt. That is the 
restriction that Thomas Jefferson was talking about, right there.
  Finally, I would like to quote from the founder of our party, Abraham 
Lincoln. He wrote, ``As an individual who undertakes to live by 
borrowing soon finds his original means devoured by interest and next 
to no one left to borrow from, so it must be with a government.''
  [[Page H481]] Let us learn from the past and not repeat these same 
mistakes to the detriment of our future generations.


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