[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 46 (Thursday, April 23, 1998)]
[House]
[Page H2302]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       AN AWESOME RESPONSIBILITY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Taylor) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. TAYLOR of Mississippi. Mr. Speaker, let me first apologize to the 
wonderful people who work for this House. I am sorry we are keeping you 
late, I am sorry I am contributing to that.
  As far as the American people, I want to apologize for the expense of 
this speech and the others. It costs about $8,000 an hour for special 
orders.
  I tried when the Democrats were in the majority to do away with it, 
to have us use a room upstairs, let these good people, approximately 80 
House employees, go home. There is no reason for these 80 people to be 
here, there is no reason for the clock to keep running. And I hope that 
some of my Republican friends who are equally cost-conscious would work 
with me on ending this practice.
  Mr. Speaker, there is a room upstairs we can use. We do not have to 
keep 80 people around. My worries are not so great they need to be 
transcribed, and I can always ask that they be included in the Record 
if I think it is worthwhile.
  I am sorry Mr. DeLay left. I do like Mr. DeLay. But I do feel like he 
said some things that need to be clarified, and I want the American 
people to know where I am coming from as I make these remarks.
  I have been here almost nine years, and in those nine years have come 
to the conclusion that both the political parties have degraded 
themselves to the point where they are not much more than organizations 
that raise money and peddle influence. So I hope that no one will take 
this as a partisan speech, but merely somebody who cares about his 
country and wants to fix it.
  I regret that Mr. DeLay would lead the public to believe that we have 
a balanced budget, because we do not, and I do consider our Nation's 
debt as the greatest threat to our Nation. I regret to tell the 
American people that we are now spending a billion dollars a day on 
interest on that debt and it is growing.
  A couple yards away from me is a real neat human being by the name of 
Duncan Hunter. He is the chairman of the Subcommittee on Military 
Procurement of the Committee on National Security. One of Duncan's 
great misfortunes is trying to replace an aging fleet for the Navy, 
replace aging airplanes for the Air Force, on a very, very small 
budget. And quite frankly, if we were not squandering a billion dollars 
a day on interest on the national debt, we could be buying a destroyer 
a day with enough change left over to buy about 20 Blackhawk 
helicopters.
  That is why it is important that we balance our budget, that is why 
it is important we be honest with the American people. And it is not a 
Democrat or Republican issue because, doggone it, they are both guilty 
in creating the debt, and the only way we are going to get out of debt 
is working together.
  I am sorry to say that the Cato Institute can back up everything that 
I have said. Actually, overall spending in the first three years that 
the Republicans have run Congress has increased at a greater rate than 
the last three years that the Democrats were in the Congress. They are 
both wrong. It is wrong for both of us.
  But defense spending has either shrunk or been frozen under both, and 
that is equally wrong. There are kids today flying around in 30-year-
old CH-46s, 30-year-old CH-47s. Almost a thousand UH-1 Hueys have been 
grounded because we finally came to the conclusion that it just was not 
fair, and above all it just was not safe to send those kids up. But 
people are still flying old F-14s, still flying old C-103s, and they 
are still going to sea in old ships.
  That is why it is important that, number one, we face up to the 
reality that we are still not balancing the budget, that we are 
borrowing from the trust funds, and it does not get any easier to get 
out of that hole for a lot of reasons, but the biggest reason is as a 
Nation we are getting older. As a Nation we are getting fewer and fewer 
people who are taxpayers and more and more people who are receiving 
benefits.
  My dad a couple of days ago turned 77 years old, and I will use his 
generation as an example. When my dad was a teenager in the 1930's, 
there were 19 working people for every retiree. One hundred years 
later, in the year 2030, it has been estimated that there will only be 
1.2 working people for every retiree. If we do not pay our bills now, 
we will never pay our bills because the ratio of workers to retirees 
continues to decline. It gets only worse all the way out to at least 
halfway through the next century.
  So what I am going to ask Mr. DeLay on one side, what I am going to 
ask my fellow Democrats on the other, let us not claim victory in the 
budget because we have not even started. We are $5.5 trillion in debt, 
and we do not need the Democrats over here or the demagogues over there 
misleading the public.
  We have an awesome responsibility to defend this nation. We have an 
equally awesome responsibility to pay our bills. We have an equally 
awesome responsibility to be honest with the American people, make them 
aware of the problem and then, as their elected representatives, both 
Democrats and Republicans, let us solve them.

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