[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 189 (Wednesday, November 29, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H13772-H13773]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




        THE SOCIAL SECURITY TRUST FUND AND BALANCING THE BUDGET

  Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Mississippi 
for yielding to me.
  Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Mississippi [Mr. Taylor] raised the 
issue of whether there is, in fact, a Balanced Budget Act before us. I 
had spoken about the fact that, and I say ``the fact'' that the budget 
proposed by the majority, by the Republican majority, by Speaker 
Gingrich, is going to take $636 billion from the Social Security trust 
fund in order to so-call balance the budget. I want to quote at this 
point, so it is not just coming from me, but from Senator Hollings in 
the other body:

       You will expend another $636 billion of the Social Security 
     trust fund. We said we were raising the Social Security taxes 
     to make certain there was trust in the trust fund through the 
     year 2050.

  That is why the FICA taxes, your Social Security tax, was raised 
previously, to make sure the trust fund was solvent. Now we are taking 
it.
  Again, quoting Senator Hollings:

       When you put together the borrowing from the trust funds 
     that must be replenished, you get the real deficit, the gross 
     Federal deficit, and the gross interest costs.

  Finally, again from Senator Hollings:

       Wait a minute. When you take the revenues in, the outlays 
     out, and you look at 

[[Page H 13773]]
     that figure, that is too high for me to run on in the next election, so 
     we will take an amount of money out of the right pocket, put 
     it into the left pocket, we will take $636 billion from 
     Social Security in this budget that we have under 
     consideration, and put it in the general fund to make it 
     appear we are balancing the budget. You will have to pay back 
     Social Security with interest and at the end of the 7-year 
     budget period, you will owe. At the end of the 7-year period, 
     we will all have to pay back supposedly over $1 trillion into 
     the Social Security trust fund, and no one has any idea, not 
     any Senator or House Member, who is going to introduce the 
     increase in taxes to refund the Social Security trust fund.

  Mr. Speaker, I wish the Speaker would come here and answer that 
question.
  Mr. TAYLOR of Mississippi. Reclaiming my time, Mr. Speaker, it came 
as quite a surprise to me yesterday in researching the Republican 
budget plan that was much touted on the floor of this House as being 
the balanced budget plan of 1995, said repeatedly, that the annual 
operating deficit for this Nation will actually increase by $33 billion 
in fiscal year 1996 over this year. I think people need to know that. 
The budget deficit will increase from $263 billion on an annual 
operating basis to $296 billion on an annual operating basis.

  Part of this, Mr. Speaker, will come from the trust funds that the 
gentleman from Hawaii [Mr. Abercrombie] just mentioned: The $118 
billion that people paid into things like the Social Security trust 
fund will be used to disguise the true nature of this debt.
  The gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Kasich] is for a balanced budget. I am 
for a balanced budget. Let us be honest with the American people. Let 
us not tell them we can spend more in spending, we can receive less in 
taxes, that we are already $5 trillion in debt, paying $1 million in 
interest payments every 2 minutes, 2 minutes, and somehow all of this 
is magically going to work without pain.
  The gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Kasich] is my friend, but let us be 
honest with this. Let us be honest with the American people. This 
morning you told me you were willing to borrow $75 billion so you could 
give people a minuscule tax break. They have to pay that back. That is 
not a gift. That is just loan sharking. You are taking money from them, 
you are giving them a little bit back, and they are going to have to 
pay back a whole heck of a lot more of the time they pay the interest. 
Let us be honest with the American people.
  The second thing I want to mention, Mr. Speaker, is I have had a 
number of calls from home. I want to assure the people of south 
Mississippi that I was one of the first members of this body to be 
against putting American troops on the ground when President Bush asked 
me to do it, and I will remain opposed to that when President Clinton 
asks me to do it.
  I traveled to that part of the world a few weeks ago, traveled up to 
the border posts in Macedonia, had the privilege with having lunch with 
some fellow Mississippians, a young man from Tupelo in particular, and 
from four-star officers to sergeant majors. Every one of them privately 
told me we should not get involved there. That is not our fight.
  These people have been fighting each other for 700 years. The only 
peace they have known recently was the 45 or so years when Tito was in 
charge there, using the iron fist of communism, and he got the Bosnians 
to quit killing Muslims and the Muslims to quit killing Serbs and the 
Croatians to quit killing the others. As soon as the iron fist of 
communism was gone, they went back to killing each other.
  Mr. Speaker, I want to close by saying that they told me that the 
smart weapons that worked so well in Desert Storm will not work in the 
cold, wet fog of Bosnia. We are going to send those kids on the ground, 
a bunch of them are going to die, and nothing good will come of it.

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