[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 142 (Tuesday, October 19, 1999)]
[House]
[Pages H10335-H10337]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




       NO TAX INCREASES OR RAIDS ON SOCIAL SECURITY, JUST FISCAL 
                             RESPONSIBILITY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Ryan of Wisconsin). Under the Speaker's 
announced policy of January 6, 1999, the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. 
Kingston) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority 
leader.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, I wanted to start off reading a letter 
that I received in my office from a couple, and I am just going to say 
Julia and Walter L. from Minneapolis, Minnesota. They actually were not 
writing me, but they carboned me on it. They were writing their own 
Representative.
  It said, ``Dear Congressman, We are Social Security recipients, and 
we vote. Despite the assurances of politicians, we are anxious about 
the safety of the Social Security Trust Fund. Specifically, we would 
appreciate your reply to the statement by Congressman Jack Kingston of 
Georgia today on the House floor.
  ``Mr. Kingston stated that President Clinton wants to spend 30 
percent more on foreign aid and to fund that increase entirely from the 
Social Security Trust Fund. We would like you to respond to 
Representative Kingston's statement on the House floor.''
  Well, I am not sure if this particular Representative did respond or 
not, but I would like to respond to Julia and Walter L.'s letter myself 
and say here is the situation that we are in with the budget, and 
foreign aid happens to be the first bill that the President has vetoed 
and required more spending of. Now, he has also vetoed the Washington, 
D.C. budget, but I think that is because he wanted to have some more 
abortion language put in there or some other social reasons. So, 
really, it was not that much that related to money.
  But the situation that we are in really started in 1997, 1997 when 
the Democrats and the Republicans passed a bipartisan budget agreement. 
This 1997 agreement said that we are going to spend X amount of dollars 
each year until the budget is balanced, and then we are going to 
continue on that and pay down the debt.
  It is one thing, Mr. Speaker, to wipe out one's deficit which is 
one's annual shortfall, but it is another thing to actually go out and 
pay down the debt.
  The easiest way to envision that is to just think about one's 
MasterCard. Most Members have a MasterCard or a Visa. Most people do. 
Imagine if, each month, one were in the red on that, and one could not 
quite pay it off. But, finally, one month, one paid it off. Well, that 
does not mean that one is going on a spending spree because the bank is 
still saying, ``Glad you paid it off this month, but what about the 3 
previous months? You have got to go back and pay that amount.''
  Well, Congress has one heck of a credit card, and we have run up the 
national debt of well over $5.4 trillion. That is trillion. That is an 
inconceivable amount of money if my colleagues think of one of the 
things that Mr. Larry Burkett said in the book called The Coming 
Economic Earthquake, that if one stacked thousand dollar bills up one 
on top of each other, to get to $1 million, it would come to about 4 
inches high. About that high, Mr. Speaker.
  But if one stacked thousand dollar bills on top of each other, to get 
to $1 trillion, it is 33 miles high. That is the difference between $1 
million and $1 trillion as depicted by thousand dollar bills.
  So we have this $5.4 trillion debt. So we should not go on a spending 
spree. Regardless of what the President wants to spend it on, it is not 
good to go on a spending spree. Now, we know that he has done that in 
Bosnia. We have already spent $12 billion in Bosnia. Our troops were 
originally supposed to be there for, I think, a year, maybe 2 years. 
Now, 5 years later, we are still in Bosnia and in the Balkans and 
Yugoslavia and everywhere else, $12 billion and 5 years later.
  Well, so now we have got this 1997 historic bipartisan budget 
agreement. Now the question is: Do we stick with it? To me, when one 
makes an agreement, one knows down home in Georgia, and I know it is 
this way in Minnesota, one sticks with one's agreement.
  Now, unfortunately, we do not do that many agreements on a handshake 
anymore. We put things in writing. We call them contracts. This thing 
was actually in writing. Should it now be up to one party to enforce 
that agreement? Should the Democrats alone be responsible because they 
voted for it? Should they? Or should the Republicans alone be 
responsible because they voted it? No. Both parties should be 
responsible, Democrats and Republicans. Yet, sadly, it seems that the 
White House has forgotten all about this agreement, and they do not 
want to participate in it anymore.
  So here we are in a budget crisis. Now we have got three choices. The 
President wants to spend more money

[[Page H10336]]

 in foreign aid, more money to North Korea, more money to Iran, more 
money to Iraq, more money to Russia, more money to the former Soviet 
States.
  We can get money from three ways around here, or we can balance the 
budget in three ways. Number one, we can cut spending in one program to 
put it into another. Number two, we can raise taxes. Well, today on the 
House floor, we gave the President and his liberal allies a chance to 
raise taxes.

  As my colleagues know, the President's tax increase proposal was for 
$19.2 billion, and he has said many times he wants to increase the tax 
on cigarettes. That was in there. There were all kinds of user fees. So 
on this $19 billion tax and fee increase package that the President of 
the United States sent to Congress, we had a vote on it. Today that 
vote failed 419 to zero. That is right. On a bipartisan basis, all the 
Democrats and all the Republicans who voted voted against the 
President's tax increase proposal. So that eliminates that.
  So if we do not want to cut spending, we do not want to raise taxes, 
then the last pot of money in this town is to raid the Social Security 
Trust Fund. That is why we are saying that the President is willing to 
raid the Social Security Trust Fund to spend more money on foreign aid.
  Now think about this, Mr. Speaker, grandmother, grandfather sitting 
around the breakfast table, reading the newspaper, sipping a little 
coffee, writing a letter to the grandchildren, commenting on the 
morning news. They happen it see, ``Hey, look at this, honey. The 
President wants to increase foreign aid, 30 percent increase. We are 
spending $12.7 billion going to foreign countries, money that was 
raised on the backs of hard-working taxpayers in America. We are 
already spending $12.7 billion on foreign countries. The President 
wants to spend more.''
  So the grandmother may turn to the grandfather and say, ``Honey, 
where would he get that money?'' Well, it looks like he is going to get 
it out of our Social Security because his $19 billion tax increase 
package has failed. One can blame that on Congress, but all the 
Democrats voted to kill his tax increase. Well, maybe the President 
will cut spending elsewhere.
  Well, do my colleagues know what is funny? I read here that Speaker 
Hastert and the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Armey) met with the President 
today at the White House, and he said, ``No, we are not going to cut 
spending.'' Well, that leaves Social Security.
  We have a huge Social Security surplus right now. But we have said in 
the Republican side, we do not want to spend one dime of Social 
Security on any reason except for Social Security. This is a profound 
change of culture in this town.
  Let me show my colleagues a chart that was prepared by the gentleman 
from Florida (Chairman Young) of the Committee on Appropriations. I 
hope I am holding this still. I hope I am putting it in the eye of the 
camera. But this is spending from the Social Security Trust Fund. It 
starts out at the far end of the column, and it shows that, from 1980 
to 1984, the way we did our accounting, no money for general operating 
purposes came out of the Social Security Trust Fund.
  So here is the chart. Spending from the Social Security Trust Fund, 
1980 to 1984, zero money. That is actually an accounting reference. It 
is not truly accurate. But do my colleagues know what? I was not in 
Congress in 1984, and there may have been some good things that 
happened. There may have been some bad things that happened in the 
budget that year. But I am not going to worry, for practical purposes, 
about the 1980 to 1984 budget.

                              {time}  2000

  But look what happened in 1984. Money started coming out of the 
Social Security Trust Fund for general operating expenses. In 1985 
about $10 billion. In 1986, $20 billion. Here in 1989, we are up to $50 
billion coming out of the Social Security Trust Fund. And then here it 
dips. And I am glad it dipped, although I am not exactly sure why. And 
then it goes back up.
  And, sadly, I want to say that this has happened under Democrat and 
Republican control. This part of the chart, Democrat controlled; this 
part is Republican controlled. But now, in a drop, a change in the 
culture in this town, in the year 2000 we have not spent one nickel out 
of the Social Security Trust Fund. This is an extremely important and 
extremely historical fact that we have to really pound over and over 
again; that this is not speculation, this is not rhetoric, this is 
truth.
  Now, I am going to go back to the desk and I will read a paper on 
that.
  Now, Mr. Speaker, the Congressional Budget Office, and we are all 
used to hearing, and we loosely throw the term around, the CBO. That is 
the Congressional Budget Office. It kind of sounds like a bunch of 
pointy-head, bean-counting accountants. And maybe they are a little bit 
over there. But I have a lot of respect for accountants and number 
crunchers. People who can look at numbers 8 hours a day have to be very 
smart. Well, we sent a letter down to those folks and we asked them 
under our budget, for the last year, have we spent any money out of the 
Social Security surplus? And they wrote back to the Speaker of the 
House, the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hastert).
  Now, remember, this is a nonpartisan group. These people are true to 
the numbers only. They cannot be manipulated one way or the other. On 
September 30, 1999, Dan Crippen, who is the Director of the 
Congressional Budget Office, he wrote the Speaker of the House back and 
said, ``You requested that we estimate the impact on the fiscal year 
2000 Social Security surplus using CBO's economic and technical 
assumptions based on a plan whereby net discretionary outlays for 
fiscal year 2000 will equal $592.1 billion. CBO estimates that this 
spending plan will not use any of the projected Social Security surplus 
in the fiscal year 2000.''
  So let me repeat that, because there is a little accounting jargon in 
here. Basically, the important part for my colleagues and I to 
concentrate on and be proud of is that the CBO, again the Congressional 
Budget Office, estimates that this spending plan will not use any of 
the projected Social Security surplus in fiscal year 2000.
  This is so important, because we have finally likened this to the guy 
who has been bobbing around out in the sea and finally gets on to the 
beach. That does not mean he is guaranteed survival, it just means he 
is not going to drown any more. He is safely on the beach. So we have 
finally gotten to the point where we are not spending Social Security 
surplus funds. And, now, what will happen?
  Well, now the President is putting pressure on us and wants to break 
the budget agreement and wants to spend Social Security. Again, I am 
saying that because the political will to raise taxes is not there. The 
vote today, 419 to 0. Every single Democrat, every single Republican 
said no to the President's $19.1 billion tax increase. So we are saying 
no to that and the President is saying no to less spending. So the 
conclusion of any logical person is that he wants to take the money out 
of Social Security. I hope that he will reconsider that position.
  It is really not the President who is worried about it. I think it is 
the Vice President. Because a recent article in The Washington Post 
says that Vice President Gore's plan is to take money out of Social 
Security; that that is part of Vice President Gore's budget. This might 
be one reason why Bill Bradley is doing so well. I do not know, and I 
do not want to get into the politics of that, but if I were the Bradley 
folks right now, I would pay real close attention to that.
  So let us talk about the Republican budget plan in general. We have 
basically a triangle, and the top of that triangle is we want to save 
and protect Social Security. Republicans do not want to use any of that 
money for any purposes except for Social Security. But if we go back 
into where we were 10 months ago, we know that the President of the 
United States 10 months ago, the Clinton-Gore people, proposed spending 
40 percent of the budget surplus and $344 billion of Social Security on 
more government programs.
  The President stood in that well right in front of the Speaker of the 
House and said that we should protect 60 percent of the budget surplus. 
Well, why 60 percent? If we were to put money in a retirement account, 
it should be there for our retirement.

[[Page H10337]]

  Imagine working for X, Y, Z Wigits. Let us say we work for a shoe 
company, and we worked hard for that shoe company for 25 years on the 
factory line, and we put money into the retirement account. And then, 
lo and behold, the day came to retire and the boss said, well, guess 
what, I needed some new production equipment a couple of years ago, so 
I put that retirement money into that. But, hey, do not worry, it was 
well spent. And then later I needed a little money for a raise for 
another worker, for somebody else, and so I gave some of that money for 
that. And then, of course, the new sign on the shoe factory, we needed 
to get that paid for, so I took that out of the retirement fund, too.

  If that happened to an American worker, he or she would sue and wind 
up owning that shoe factory, because that is the law of the land. But 
in Congress we can take grandmother's Social Security money and spend 
it on roads and bridges and congressional salaries and departments and 
bureaucrats all day long and there is no problem with it.
  But we have stopped that. And that is the very big significance 
between the Democrat and the Republican Party, is that for the first 
time in history we have said no to spending the Social Security surplus 
on anything but Social Security. It is the first point of our budget, 
100 percent of Social Security, and we put it in what we call a 
security lockbox. And the security lockbox just says that not only are 
we not going to spend it by voting not to spend it, but we are even 
going to create an accounting mechanism to make sure that the trust 
fund is safely locked away.
  So we did that. We called it a lockbox, and it passed here on an 
overwhelming basis. It went over to the Senate and, lo and behold, the 
Senate, under the direction of the Clinton-Gore team, has said no to 
the lockbox. So now it is stuck over there. But I call on the liberals 
in the Senate to please, please do what they can do to get this thing 
done, because it is very important. Again, it had bipartisan support on 
the floor of the House.
  Well, we took another step in our budget. We went to debt reduction. 
We do not talk about debt reduction around here, we talk about wiping 
out the deficit, the annual debt, but we do not talk about paying down 
the debt. Our budget pays down $2.2 trillion in debt, and that is real 
important for my small children. Little 8-year-old Jim Kingston would 
love to live in a debt-free America one day, and I am going to do 
everything I can to make it happen.
  These are the main points of our budget, Mr. Speaker. We do not want 
to spend Social Security money. We want to protect and preserve it. We 
want to stop the raid on it. I think it is a very important proposal, 
and I certainly hope that the President and the Vice President will 
work with us. Because it is important not just for America's seniors, 
not just for the next election, but for the next generation.

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