[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 40 (Friday, March 3, 1995)]
[House]
[Page H2645]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                          THE FEDERAL DEFICIT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Oxley). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentleman from New York [Mr. Solomon] is recognized for 5 
minutes.
  Mr. SOLOMON. Mr. Speaker, I was going to stand up here today and talk 
about the fact that over the last 16 years I have been trying to enact 
legislation dealing with regulatory reform that would give back 
property rights to the people of this country, but I was so angered 
this morning when I woke up about 6 a.m. in the morning and I was 
watching CNN. I saw the President and his press secretary talking about 
how they had killed the balanced budget amendment. And how they now 
could get down to the serious business of balancing the budget over the 
next 7 years.
  I have never been so mad in my life. I have a chart here, which says, 
``deficit projections and debt accumulation.'' This was President 
Clinton's budget as he offered it last year. And as you can see, he 
projected a deficit in 1995 of $165 billion, and it grew all the way 
over so that at the end of 5 years, there is an accumulation of $894 
billion in new accumulated debt to go to the $4.5 trillion we already 
have.
  This year, in January, he just gave us his new 5-year projection. 
This is just a year later. And what does this show? It shows in 1995, 
$193 billion in accumulated debt in just this first year. That is 30 
billion higher than last year. And if you look at 1996, it goes from 
$170 billion deficit to $197 billion and so on over to the end of the 
5-year period.
  So what has he done? He has increased the national debt by almost a 
trillion dollars over the next 5 years. And they talk about wanting to 
balance the budget.
  The one thing that is said is true, and that is that Congress just 
does not have the guts to balance the budget themselves. That is too 
bad. And, therefore, they do need that prodding. That is what those 
five Senators that promised to vote for a balanced budget amendment 
last year during their election said that needed to happen. Yet today 
they turned around and voted ``no.''
  You know, Mr. Speaker, I introduced a budget last year. It was an 
alternative to both the Democrat and Republican budgets. And if you 
look at this bottom figure, we accumulated, instead of a trillion 
dollars over 5 years, we accumulated only $252 billion. But the 
interesting thing is that every single year the deficit dramatically 
dropped from $132 billion the first year down to $69 billion the second 
year, $47 billion the third year, $12 billion the fourth year, and a 
surplus of $8 billion in the fifth year.
  You say, how did you do that? Because all of the pundits say, you 
cannot do that without raising taxes. You cannot do that without 
cutting Social Security. You cannot do that without cutting into 
contractual obligations to veterans.
  Well, my colleagues, we did that. How did we do it. We did it by 
eliminating 150 programs like the Interstate Commerce Commission, that 
is totally wasteful. We privatized 125 government agencies, like the 
Federal Aviation Administration. We consolidated 35 government 
functions like the Bureau of Indian Affairs that has been there for 70 
years and does nothing today. And downsized the Department of Education 
from 5,000 employees down to an office of only 500. We abolished the 
Department of Energy, which has not produced a gallon of gasoline or a 
quart of oil, we cut out 16,000 employees there and let the free market 
system work.
  We converted the Department of Commerce from an overblown department 
of 36,000 employees down to only 3,000 and made them a consultative 
body to business and industry instead of this huge bureaucratic 
department. And then we means tested every single Federal program, 
including school lunch programs.
  People say, Republicans want to do away with school lunch programs. 
We do not want to do away with school lunch programs. What we want to 
do is make Members of Congress ineligible because of their total wages. 
We make $129,000 or $130,000 a year. Why should the Government be 
subsidizing my children's school lunches? They should not, because we 
cannot afford it. And we means test that with people with incomes over 
$50,000.
  Medicare, people with incomes of over $100,000 or $200,000 are being 
subsidized by the Federal Government for their health care. That is all 
well and good, I suppose, if you can afford it. But we do not have the 
money. And we means test everything else across the board.
  Do you know what that did? That gave us an $800 billion savings over 
5 years, and we balanced the budget without hurting people, by truly 
taking care of the needy.
  It can be done, but we cannot do it the way this president is trying 
to do it.


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