[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 40 (Tuesday, April 8, 1997)]
[House]
[Pages H1310-H1311]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




             FEDERAL GOVERNMENT NEEDS TO BALANCE ITS BUDGET

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Georgia [Mr. Kingston] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, yesterday I drove over to Cousin Artie and 
Rebecca's house to pick up my daughter Anne, who had walked to their 
house after ballet. Anne's first cousin and best friend is Arabella 
Hadwin. And Arabella came out; she was wearing an Indian costume. Kind 
of leather. Actually, fake leather with frills on it. It had 
Pocahontas's picture on it.
  So I said to 6-year-old Arabella, ``Arabella, do you know today is 
Pocahontas's wedding day?''

                              {time}  1815

  She looked at me, and I could tell in that little 6-year-old mind she 
was

[[Page H1311]]

thinking, and she said, ``She's dead.'' And I said, ``Well, you're 
right, Pocahontas is dead, but this is the day that she got married on 
a long, long time ago, many years ago.'' Then Arabella said, ``Oh, you 
mean she got married on Monday?'' And I said, ``Well, no, she really 
got married on April 7.''
  But it is funny how kids interpret things when we talk to them. You 
never quite know when they are listening or how they are listening and 
so forth. But I enjoy talking to children, I enjoy talking to small 
kids and to seniors in high school and college kids and so forth. One 
of the things I often ask small kids in schools, ``How many of you have 
an allowance?'' Inevitably half the class has an allowance. ``What do 
you make?'' Two or three dollars a week. Some of them make $5. Some of 
them are well-heeled, I guess, they make $10 a week. I said, ``Let me 
ask you this. You make $10 a week, how much do you spend?'' And they 
always kind of giggle, ``Well, I spend a little bit of it but my dad 
and mom like me to save some so I don't spend all of it.''
  ``Let me ask you this. You make $2 a week; do you ever spend $2.10?'' 
They look at me like I am crazy. ``Do you ever spend $2.25?'' ``No.'' 
``Do you ever spend $2.50?'' At this point they know I am crazy, and 
they are wondering what the heck is this guy talking about. I say, I am 
your Member of the U.S. Congress. Did you know that the U.S. Congress 
also has an allowance? We call it tax revenue, and we get a certain 
amount a year; sometimes it is about $1.3 trillion. But do you know 
what we do? We grownups, we professional men and women who are paid to 
represent you and spend your money, we spend more of that allowance 
than we make. You send us $1.3 trillion and we spend $1.5 trillion. It 
seems to be the case, Democrats or Republicans, we overspend.
  These kids cannot believe it. These kids, who have such innocent 
faces and such belief in mom and dad and the United States of America 
look at me in disbelief. Why would you spend more money than you bring 
in? Why would you spend more than your allowance? How can you spend 
that? And then we talk about the national debt and it is a very real 
problem. It is not something that, well, this is an amusing story to 
talk about my niece Arabella. This is truth. This is reality. When 
Members of Congress go out and they try to be the big mom or dad 
spending all the money, expanding social programs, talking about we 
need this for the United States of America, they are not spending their 
own money, they are spending little children's money. I see today in 
the gallery some children. Guess whose tab they will be picking up in 
the future?
  Our debt, Mr. Speaker, right now is $5.1 trillion. Let me give the 
definition of $1 trillion. Shaq, the famous basketball player, 
Shaquille O'Neal, makes $30 million a year. Do you know how many years 
he would have to play to make $1 trillion? Thirty-three thousand years, 
just to make $1 trillion.
  Another definition. If you have a boxcar full of thousands of dollar 
bills crammed to the top, you have $65 million in the boxcar. Do you 
know how long the train would have to be, Mr. Speaker, to get to $1 
trillion? The train, with boxcars of $65 million each, would have to be 
240 miles long to get to $1 trillion. And we, the big spenders in 
Congress, have left a debt, are looking at a debt right now of $5.1 
trillion. Yet the sad thing is we still have deficit spending. We still 
are spending more of our allowance money than we bring in. The children 
of America will be picking up this money. It will take years and years 
to pay down this debt.
  But the first step is to balance the budget. We have not had a 
balanced budget since 1969, which, as you remember, was when Woodstock 
was the big thing and everybody wanted to get out of Vietnam and 
Richard Nixon was President and the ``Mod Squad'' was on TV. That is 
how long it has been, Mr. Speaker. The time is now to stop this. This 
Congress, this year, let us pass a balanced budget and get on to save 
the United States of America for our children.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Gutknecht). Under a previous order of 
the House, the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Gekas] is recognized 
for 5 minutes.

  [Mr. GEKAS. addressed the House. His remarks will appear hereafter in 
the Extensions of Remarks.]

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