[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 123 (Wednesday, September 16, 1998)]
[House]
[Page H7813]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               THERE IS NO REAL SURPLUS TO GIVE TAX CUTS

  (Mr. PALLONE asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I want to follow up on what the previous 
speaker said, not only my Republican colleague from Wisconsin, but also 
my Democratic colleague from Oregon.
  Seniors understand, when we talk to them and when we have town 
meetings, that there is essentially no surplus; that the so-called 
surplus that we talk about is essentially what is owed to Social 
Security, and that we have to pay back a lot of money to the Social 
Security trust fund over the next 5 or 10 years if we are to have 
enough benefits to pay out to Social Security recipients.
  That is why this Republican tax proposal is really the wrong way to 
go. What will happen, essentially, is that we will, in fact, increase 
the debt and, ultimately, may have to raise taxes in order to provide 
the benefits that Social Security recipients need.
  So what I say is we spent a lot of time last year on a bipartisan 
basis to pass a Balanced Budget Act. We have a balanced budget, but we 
still have this problem that we have to pay back Social Security. We do 
not have a surplus. We do not have one to spend.
  Let us not, in the few weeks we have here in this Congress, waste our 
time trying to kid the American people that somehow we are going to 
give them tax relief. It is not really there to spend.

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