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




           THE PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS OF BALANCING THE BUDGET

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Florida [Mr. Weldon] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight to talk a little 
bit about our balanced budget proposal, our 7-year balanced budget 
proposal, and in particular the President and his previous claims of 
supporting a balanced budget, and I do want to dwell a little bit on 
the issue of Medicare. I think Medicare is a very important issue.
  Mr. Speaker, I am very familiar with the Medicare system. I earned my 
living prior to coming to the House of Representatives, and I plan on 
when I leave the House of Representatives going back to, practicing 
medicine. I am a physician, and I very much enjoyed taking care of 
senior citizens as an internist. About half of my clinical practice was 
caring for seniors, and I know firsthand how much our seniors depend on 
the Medicare program, and I think what the President is doing with this 
issue is truly disgraceful, and he is playing pure politics with the 
Medicare program, and in his proposal he wants to lower the Medicare 
premium to 25 percent, and then in subsequent years, after the 
election, essentially after he has bought the senior vote, he is going 
to let it drift up. In our proposal the Medicare part B premium will do 
exactly what it has done over the previous 7 years under the Democrats 
of this House. It will slowly double. Under the President's proposal it 
will double as well, but it goes down in the crucial year of 1996 when 
he is seeking to get reelected.
  What are we talking about in our budget proposal? We are talking 
about a 7-year balanced budget proposal. We have not been able to get 
the President to agree to this very fundamental principle. This is a 
man who ran in 1992 pledging that he would balance the budget in 5 
years. Three years after he has been elected, he is refusing to sign on 
to a 7-year balanced budget proposal. Instead he is putting forward 
this budget proposal that supposedly gets us to balance in 10 years, 13 
years after he has been elected when he ran on a 5-year proposal. We 
have welfare reform in our budget proposal. He refuses to support that, 
a man who ran saying that he was going to end welfare as we know it.
  What else do we have in our budget proposal? Tax relief for families 
with children. When my father was raising myself and my three sisters, 
as a postal worker he sent 4 percent of his income to Washington. Now 
those working fathers with children send 25 to 30 percent of their 
income to Washington. That is the single biggest reason why so many of 
those working families with children have to put mama out to work, too, 
and my colleagues know what happens then. They do not spend as much 
time with their kids. In the 1950's the average parents spent 35 hours 
a week in direct contact with their children. They now spend 17 hours a 
week. Who is talking care of the kids? The television loaded with 
violence.
  Finally, what else do we have in our budget proposal? We have 
economic incentives, a capital gains reduction that will pump money 
back into the economy, that will create jobs, jobs for people who are 
unemployed, and the President is refusing to sign on to any of these 
things, and what is the most crass thing, he is actually going so far 
as to try to claim he is trying to protect Medicare when in reality it 
is a temporary thing in Medicare. A year later the Medicare premiums 
will rise, and rise, and rise, and rise, and the President knows all 
this. But yet he is continuing to play politics. When the Medicare 
program was created, the Medicare part B premium was supposed to be 
shared by seniors, 50 percent coming out of the pockets of working 
people, 50 percent coming out of the pockets of seniors. Today many of 
those working people who are being taxed to support the Medicare 
Program cannot afford health insurance themselves. In our budget 
proposal we keep the percentage at 31\1/2\ percent. That is what it is 
at today. We think that is a fair and reasonable thing to do.

  But yet the President is trying to play politics with this. He is 
trying to lower the Medicare premium in an election year, and then he 
is going to turn around and raise it on seniors just like he turned 
around and raised taxes in 1993 after he ran in 1992 saying that he was 
going to give middle-class working Americans a tax cut. He raised taxes 
on them; he raised taxes on senior citizens. Senior citizens had their 
Social Security income taxed, an increase in their taxes.
  Mr. Speaker, I encourage all my colleagues in the House, as well as 
my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, to put politics aside and 
join together in a reasonable proposal to get us toward a balanced 
budget in 7 years.

                              {time}  2000

  It is for our future, it is for the future of our children, it is for 
the future of our children's children. What kind of life are we going 
to leave the next generation? In years past, you paid off the farm, you 
did not leave the kids a mortgage. Today in America, today in America, 
every child that is born is being born into an economy where they owe 
$18,000 of debt. They are going to have to pay back with interest on 
that debt about $18,000. That is $4.9 trillion worth of debt. Mr. 
Speaker, I encourage the President to support our budget, to vote in 
favor of balancing the budget in 7 years.

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