[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 205 (Wednesday, December 20, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H15266-H15267]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           THE BUDGET IMPASSE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Connecticut [Mr. Gejdenson] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. GEJDENSON. Mr. Speaker, there are a couple of issues that I think 
need to be focused in on. The first is that the outlays in this year's 
budget are virtually the same between the President's budget and the 
Republican Congress' budget. Would the gentleman agree with that? The 
gentleman agrees with that. So what we are doing is we are shutting 
down Government on no difference; a 7-year difference, but in the 
meantime, we are causing injury to American citizens.
  On the other hand, what we could simply do is what we have done in 
the past, to say ``Government will continue to operate even at a lower 
figure than either the Republicans or the President has asked for, and 
we will continue to negotiate.''
  Why are we having this impasse? The impasse is because the 
Republicans believe that they cannot give up their tax break; that 
everything else ought to be discussed: that student loans for kids 
ought to be cut, or worse than ought to be cut. On student loans, their 
proposal shifts billions of dollars to bankers, and makes it harder for 
kids to go to school by ending the direct loan program.
  They say that seniors ought to pay more for health care; that poor 
people get no health care at all, possibly; that seniors get thrown out 
of nursing homes; that the environment is degraded. But let me tell you 
something; one thing they will not talk about is why we cannot shrink 
the tax break for billionaires.
  Mr. Speaker, $245 billion in tax breaks, that is what is holding this 
process up. The difference between having people go to work and people 
not working is whether or not the tax break is sacrosanct. Mr. Speaker, 
what is going to happen here? Some 3.3 million veterans who have their 
checks due on December 29 may not get them. We are having problems in 
the Northeast with cold weather and snow. Programs that help the needy 
are going to be cut and stopped so that the greediest among us can be 
benefited.
  Let us think about how you run a family. If you have a family and 
there is a crisis, you call the family together. You do not tell the 
kids they are not eating for a week until mom and dad can get together 
on a decision. You sit down and you start talking and you talk until 
there is a solution, but you also do not say ``Well, our youngest son 
just got married. He has a mortgage, he is in trouble. We are going to 
cut him. Our two other kids in college, we are pulling them out. Our 
oldest kid is in Beverly Hills, living in a $10 million mansion. Do you 
know what we are going to do? We are going to send that child a little 
extra money.'' That is not how you run a family, that is not how you 
run a business. The responsibilities that we have in this institution 
are not simply to take our ball and go home if we do not get it our 
way.
  Mr. SMITH of Michigan. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. GEJDENSON. I yield to the gentleman from Michigan.
  Mr. SMITH of Michigan. My understanding is that the gentleman from 
Ohio [Mr. Kasich] and the gentleman from Georgia [Mr. Gingrich] say 
everything is on the negotiating table except a true, real balanced 
budget in 7 years.
  Mr. GEJDENSON. Mr. Speaker, what we have seen is that the one place 
your side has refused to budge on is the tax break. We have even said, 
bring the tax break down to working families. Get rid of the guys at 
the top, the people who make $200,000, $300,000 a year, and then we are 
closer. ``No, we want to protect them,'' is what the Republicans say.
  Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. GEJDENSON. I yield to the gentleman from Maryland.
  Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, I say to my friend, the gentleman from 
Michigan [Mr. Smith], you had an opportunity to do that yesterday. The 
gentleman from Texas [Mr. Stenholm], who has been the most outspoken 
advocate of a balanced budget on this floor in either party, I suggest 
to you, and in fact it was the Stenholm constitutional amendment that 
passed this House this year, as the gentleman knows who got up on the 
floor yesterday and said, ``Let us defeat the previous question, put 
the coalition budget on the floor with an open rule.''
  The coalition budget, as you know, cuts more money than the 
Republican budget that we passed. It has less of a deficit. Next year, 
the year after, as a matter of fact, as you know, your budget has a 
very substantial deficit in the first 2 years. It does not cut taxes. 
It preserves, as the President has indicated, Medicare and Medicaid at 
numbers that the President, I believe, could sign. It is a cut, as you 
know, substantial, more than some on my side could support, but the 
fact of the matter is every Republican Member voted against allowing 
that on this floor.
  Mr. SMITH of Michigan. That is not true. Some Republicans voted for 
it. Only 60-some Democrats voted for it.
  Mr. HOYER. I stand corrected, it was four.
  
[[Page H15267]]


                              {time}  1600
             UNINTERRUPTED NEGOTIATIONS FOR BALANCED BUDGET

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from New Jersey [Mr. Saxton] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SAXTON. Mr. Speaker, earlier this afternoon the House Republican 
Conference passed by a unanimous majority a resolution calling on 
Speaker Gingrich and Leader Dole to proceed with uninterrupted 
negotiations until this budget matter is resolved.
  I would like to be home with my family, as I am sure all of you 
would, but I think there are some matters that take precedence from 
time to time, and in this case in a historic time, over matters of 
personal interest. This is a matter of personal interest to many 
Americans across the country.
  Now, when we talk about the national debt and that it is $5 trillion, 
it is kind of easy for people's eyes to glaze over because none of us 
can relate to a sum of money that is that large. So sometimes we say, 
well, if you divided it by 280 million, you could see how much that is 
for each man, woman, and child in the country. Of course, that number 
of $18,000 for each of us, our share of the responsibility; but that is 
somewhere off somewhere else, and we do not have to worry abut it 
immediately.
  I would say to all of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, it is 
important to stay here and keep these negotiations going, which I am 
convinced we are going to do, because April 15 comes around every year, 
and look at it this way: If you went to the bank or if I went to the 
bank to get a loan and, let us say, I borrowed $18,000 and the bank was 
kind enough to make that loan to me, they would charge me interest, and 
that interest probably would be in the neighborhood of 6 or 7 or 8 
percent, depending on conditions at the time. And that would cost me, 
if it were 7 percent, that would cost me $1,260 a year as an individual 
in interest.
  Now, I would submit to you that when America's families sit down at 
the kitchen table and fill out their income tax forms each year, they 
write a check for the interest on $18,000, which is probably about 7 
percent, and send the check for each member of the family for $1,260 to 
Washington, DC, so that we can pay our interest on the national debt. 
So it is something that families relate to, and it is something that 
has a monetary pocketbook-type importance to American families.

  Recently the Joint Economic Committee did a report, and published it, 
on further costs to the American family. This chart represents the cost 
of not balancing the budget to each American family for things other 
than interest on the national debt, an additional $2,308. Let me just 
suggest how we got to that figure.
  Most families have a mortgage on their house; not everybody, but most 
families have a mortgage on their house. It would not be unusual today 
to have a mortgage for, say, $100,000. The economists tell us that the 
interest on mortgage rates would be reduced by about 2.2 percent a 
year, in other words, coming down from an average of about 8 percent to 
about 6 percent; and that would be pretty neat, amounting to a savings 
of $1,456 a year for a family. That is not bad by anybody's standards.
  It is not unusual also for middle-class families to have students in 
school, and it is not unusual for them to have a loan to send that 
student to school. If we got that interest rate reduction because we 
balanced the budget, families would save an additional $50 a year.
  It is not unusual for families to have car loans, either; $15,000 
would be a modest car loan today, and if we got that 2 percent 
reduction in interest because we balanced the budget, the family would 
save an additional $108 a year.
  Now, part of the Republican tax cut package that the Democrats have 
referred to here as cuts for the rich, part of that package, a 
substantial part of that package, is a $500-per-child tax credit; and 
so if our family that we are talking about had one child, they would 
save an additional $500 because they would get the child deduction.
  So all of these things added together, plus what we might anticipate 
in higher wages and more jobs, which could produce an economic growth 
which some estimate could be just under $200 a year for this family, 
another $194, all adding up to over $2,300 a year in savings for the 
family.
  So if we balance the budget and people did not have to send their 
$1,200 to Washington for each member of the family to pay interest on 
the national debt, and if we arrived at savings something like this, we 
would have a very significant savings for each family. That is why it 
is important to balance the budget. That is why we released this JEC 
report.
  We would be happy to send it out to any Member or anyone else who 
wants this report, simply by calling my office.

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