[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 10 (Thursday, January 25, 1996)]
[House]
[Page H857]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        CUTTING BUDGET DEFICITS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from Colorado [Mrs. Schroeder] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Ms. SCHROEDER. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from North 
Carolina [Mr. Hefner].
  Mr. HEFNER. Mr. Speaker, I want to set the record straight here, 
talking about all the budgets the President has submitted. If you want 
to be honest about this thing, in all honesty, the budget you people 
offered there was not the President's budget. You made a big to-do 
about it. You took some numbers out of some statements that were made. 
It was not a budget that was offered by the President of the United 
States. That is totally wrong.
  Mr. Speaker, when you wanted to rewrite history, you offered a 
budget. The budget passed. The President vetoed it. You went into 
deliberations with the President of the United States. You said, ``We 
will not talk anymore until the President offers a balanced budget 
scored by CBO.'' That was the big argument in this House and in the 
Senate and across this country, scored by CBO.
  The President came up with a budget that was scored by CBO. It was 
not to your liking, so you said, ``No, that is not good enough. You 
have to move closer to where we want to go. And if you do not, if you 
do not accept our deal, there will be no deal and we will shut the 
Government down.''
  Let us not rewrite history here in these 5-minute speeches. The 
President in good faith offered a 7-year budget scored by CBO. The 
President stood in this well on his State of the Union Address and 
said, ``We have got enough cuts to balance the budget in 7 years.'' Why 
do you not agree to take these cuts and balance the budget, and then we 
will talk about these philosophical arguments later?
  You mention Medicare, you mention Social Security, you mention 
Medicaid. When you start talking about these programs, gentlemen, I 
hate to say it, but you do not have any credibility. You opposed all of 
these programs since their inception. You opposed Social Security, you 
opposed Medicare, and one of the candidates for President of the United 
States, our dear Senator from the other body said, ``Thirty-five years 
ago I stood and said it would not work. I fought Medicare.'' Your 
Speaker of this House said, ``It is going to die on the vine. Medicare, 
we hope it dies on the vine.'' Your majority leader said, ``Social 
Security should never have been established.'' So your record ain't 
good on these programs.
  If you want to talk about philosophy and these things, we can talk 
about that, but there is a proposal that the President of the United 
States has offered that balances the budget in 7 years, and it is 
scored by CBO.
  Mrs. SCHROEDER. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Michigan 
[Mr. Dingell].
  Mr. DINGELL. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding to me.
  My good friend from Michigan is a wonderful Member, and I am very 
fond of him. But his memory is short; it tends to be a little on the 
convenient side. The gentleman has forgotten where this big debt came 
from.
  When Jimmy Carter left office and Ronald Reagan came in, the national 
debt of the United States was $700 billion. With Reagan's first budget, 
the so-called Gramm-Latta budget, Democrats over here warned that the 
practical consequences of that was going to be that it was going to 
enormously increase the debt because it immensely increased military 
expenditures, cut expenses in other programs slightly, and gave a 
massive tax cut to the well-to-do.
  Mr. Speaker, as a result of that, the national debt by the time that 
Mr. Reagan left office went from $700 billion to $4.5 trillion. It 
multiplied somewhere between 5 and 7 times.
  My Republican colleagues, in talking about debt, deficits, and fiscal 
irresponsibility, forget the fact that it was their budget. They also 
forget the fact that the Democrats during that period of time who 
controlled the House cut, cut the Reagan budgets by $49 billion, and 
they reapportioned the money so we spent less on defense and we spent 
more on environment, on health, on senior citizens, on education, and 
on things that are really important to the long life of this country.
  I want to tell my good friend something else. He is complaining about 
the entitlement programs. The Republicans on this side of the aisle 
came up with a great idea, that cost-of-living should be included in 
Social Security. Up until that time, the Congress always raised Social 
Security payments and adjusted the income and the outgo so that the two 
figures would be roughly in balance, and so that the fund would remain 
safe and secure and solvent. There was a congressionally managed 
program, which we managed very carefully.
  My Republican colleagues did not like voting on that, and they 
figured that the best way they could get out of casting that vote was 
to then tie it to the cost-of-living, so that is how Social Security 
began to get out of balance, because my Republican colleagues came up 
with a splendid idea that Social Security should become essentially a 
pay-as-you-go, rather than a trust fund program. That is why we have 
that program to address today. That is why the budget is in such a 
mess.

                          ____________________