[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 2 (Thursday, January 4, 1996)]
[House]
[Page H159]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       BUDGET DISPUTE IS INSANITY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from North Carolina [Mr. Watt] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I had made some effort to 
stay out of this dispute to the extent that I could in terms of the 
debate, but several of my constituents have called and expressed severe 
concern about the direction that we are headed and concern that I had 
not been as vocal on this issue as they expected me to be as their 
Representative.
  The people who called me are real citizens of this country. They are 
constituents of mine in my congressional district. They are a Federal 
prison guard who is continuing to work because he has a critical 
position in the prison system, and despite the fact that he continues 
to work, he is not now being paid on a timely basis. Although he 
acknowledges that he may be paid in the future, he asked me, ``What 
should I tell my creditors in the meantime?'' And I had no answer for 
him.
  They are VA hospital employees who care for our veterans, and live in 
my congressional district and work at a VA hospital located in my 
congressional district, who continue to provide services to their 
patients at veterans hospitals but are not currently being paid.
  They are people who had a real estate closing scheduled to close so 
that they could avoid a foreclosure on their house, and when they got 
ready to close, they were advised that the FHA had closed its doors and 
they could not close their loan.
  They are people who had sought to go to England for a special 
training program, who were advised that they could not be issued a 
passport for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that they had been 
provided.
  I had no answers for them, because I have thought that all along this 
dispute is absolutely insane. There is little if any connection between 
the continuing operation of the Federal Government and the resolution 
of the larger budget issue that we face.
  Notwithstanding that, my Republican colleagues have succeeded in, as 
they always do, reducing this major dispute to a one-sentence simple-
minded kind of expression--``Let's have a 7-year balanced budget.''
  Well, they told us that they were going to operate our Government, or 
try to make it operate, like the private industry operates.
  Well, I do not know of any private industry that can tell me how much 
income they are going to have 7 years from now. I do not know of any 
private industry that itemizes the expenditures that they will make 7 
years from now. I do not know of any individual, either in this House 
or outside this House, who can tell me how much income they will have, 
CBO numbers or otherwise, 7 years from now.

                              {time}  1915

  I do not know of any individual either in this House or outside this 
House that can itemize for me what expenditures they will make 7 years 
from now. So we have got this kind of simple-minded ``there is 
something magic about 7 years'' that my colleagues cannot live up to, 
and they have boxed themselves in and they are holding the American 
public hostage to their simple-mindedness.
  So I want to call on my colleagues, in conclusion, Mr. Speaker, to, 
please, come to your senses. This makes no sense. Let us open the 
Government. Let us keep negotiating about these budget issues and get 
them resolved and do what the American people sent us here to do.

                          ____________________