[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 179 (Monday, November 13, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H12166-H12167]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 NOW IS THE TIME TO BALANCE THE BUDGET

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Barr). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentleman from Indiana [Mr. Burton] is recognized for 5 
minutes.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, I agree with just about 
everything my colleague the gentleman from Florida, who preceded me, 
has just said. I have been in Congress now for 13 years, and I have 
gone out and had a lot of town meetings with senior citizens and people 
from all across my district. I have talked all across the country. When 
you talk to people about the pain of cutting spending, people say, ``We 
have to balance that budget. We do not want to leave a legacy of debt 
to our kids and to our grandkids. We do not 

[[Page H 12167]]
want to see hyperinflation in this country.''
  After you get through talking, we start going around the room and we 
let them ask questions. Inevitably, somebody will say, ``You are not 
going to cut this program, are you?'' Somebody will say, ``You are not 
going to cut this program, are you?'' Before you know it, everybody in 
the room has some program that the Federal Government funds, or 
partially funds, that they are all interested in; maybe highways, maybe 
Medicare, maybe Social Security, maybe welfare. It may be a number of 
things, but everybody wants the budget balanced and they want their 
kids to be secure and their future to be secure, but they do not want 
their programs to be cut.

  We have had 40 years of movement toward socialism, toward complete 
government control over our lives. Make no mistake about it, we are at 
a point now where if we do not make some real hard decisions, we are 
going to get what we do not want as a Nation. If you look around the 
world, and I am on the Committee on International Relations, I can tell 
you a lot of countries that have hyperinflation have disintegration of 
government and government services because they have gone too far. We 
are heading in that direction. We have to make some choices.
  The people in this country last year elected a Republican majority in 
the House and Senate because they wanted change. They wanted a balanced 
budget. Eighty-eight percent of the people in this country want a 
balanced budget. If I were talking to America tonight, Mr. Speaker, I 
would say, ``Look, there is no easy way out. We are going to have to 
bite the bullet. Everybody is going to have to have a little bit of the 
share of pain.''
  We are not cutting these programs. We are slowing the growth of the 
programs. Medicare is not going to be cut. The growth in Medicare is 
going to be 6.5 percent over the next 7 years. It is going to grow. But 
we are not going to allow it to grow at 10 to 15 percent, like it grew 
before. We are going to give money for the school lunch program. It is 
going to grow, but we are going to send the money back to the States so 
the Governors can more efficiently spend the money, rather than have 
some bureaucracy here in Washington spend it.
  We have to do something about welfare reform. The President now says 
he is going to veto welfare reform. Everybody in the country knows 
welfare is out of control. There is flagrant fraud in the welfare 
system. We have to do something about it. Now he says he is going to 
veto it.
  The bottom line is, Mr. Speaker, if I were talking to America, I 
would say if we want a balanced budget, then we are going to have to 
get on with it. We are going to have to get on with it. We are going to 
have to slow the growth in these programs. Yes, we are going to have to 
cut out some bureaucracy and some governmental agencies. We intend to 
do that.
  The President is pandering to the fears of senior citizens. He knows 
that the premiums for Medicare are going to have to go up, but he wants 
to postpone these major changes until after the next election. I am 
telling seniors, if they are paying attention, that after the next 
election these increases are going to be there, but they are going to 
be bigger, because we will have postponed them for a year. We want to 
deal with the problem now. We want to deal with it in an equitable and 
fair way.
  The benefits will continue to go up. The premiums are going to go up 
a little bit. There is no question about it. But we know that the 
Medicare system is going to fail if we do not do something. The 
President's commission said it is going to go bankrupt if we do not do 
something, so we are trying to do it in a responsible way, and he is 
down there at the White House with his glasses down over his nose, 
vetoing it, saying he is going to save it for seniors.
  The fact of the matter is he knows, we all know, we are going to have 
to deal with that problem. We want to deal with it now, in an equitable 
way, so the pain they are going to feel in a year is not as severe as 
it would be right now.
  We have no deal with the budget deficits. We are at $5 trillion. In a 
few years it will be $7 trillion. The interest alone on the debt will 
be so high we will not be able to manage this Government without 
printing money and causing hyperinflation. We have to control the 
deficit. We have to balance the budget, and we have a plan to do it in 
7 years.
  He does not want to do. He says how about 9 years, 10 years, 11 
years. There is going to be no end to it, America. We will never have a 
balanced budget until we make the decision to do it. We want to do it 
now. We want to hold the President's feet to the fire. I think that is 
what America wants. If we do not do it now, it will never happen, and 
we will rue the day that we turned our backs on this opportunity.

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