[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 143 (Wednesday, October 20, 1999)]
[House]
[Pages H10516-H10517]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




              THE ECONOMY, THE BUDGET, AND SOCIAL SECURITY

  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, I wanted to kind of review the events of 
the last year in terms of the budget situation that we are in with the 
House. As my colleagues know, the House convened in January and at that 
time, the President of the United States stood in that well and 
proposed that we spend 40 percent of the Social Security surplus. He 
said, I think we should only reserve 60 percent and dedicate the rest 
to a number of programs that he had outlined in his presentation.
  Well, we on the Republican side and many of the Democrats said, you 
know what, Mr. President, we want to preserve 100 percent of Social 
Security. Because after all, if one is an employee in a factory and one 
works and one puts money aside in a retirement plan, when one retires, 
by law, that plan has to be there; that money has to be there for you. 
Only in the United States of America can we mix a retirement plan with 
operating expenses, and we call that Social Security, and it is wrong.
  This time, things have been different. For the first time in modern 
history, the U.S. Congress has not spent one dime of Social Security on 
anything else but Social Security. It is very significant.
  So now we are in this budget negotiation. The genesis of the budget 
agreement was 1997 and there was a bipartisan budget agreement. 
Democrat Members, Republican Members, the White House, the Senate, the 
House, everybody signed off on a bipartisan agreement to get spending 
under control. I think as a result of that, partly, but mostly because 
of the strong economy, the budget has now become balanced. That is to 
say, we do not have a deficit, yet we still have a debt. We have a debt 
of $5.4 trillion.

                              {time}  1945

  That money, Mr. Speaker, has to be paid by our children if we do not 
do anything about it. So I do not think it is just good enough for us 
to pat ourselves on the back that we have eliminated the deficit. We 
have to go back and pay off the debt.
  So right now we have this budget agreement in place, and that has 
been the guide for 13 different appropriation bills. Most of these have 
passed the House and the Senate, and they are at the White House. A few 
of them are going to be done in the next, probably 5 legislative days. 
Yet the President has already vetoed the foreign aid bill. He wants us 
to spend more money on foreign aid. So we say to the President and Al 
Gore, because the vice president is very much involved in this process, 
we say, Mr. Gore, Mr. Clinton, where do you want the money to come from 
for more foreign aid?
  We do not think the House has the will to raise taxes and, indeed, 
yesterday by a vote of 419 to 0, Democrats joined Republicans in 
rejecting the Clinton-Gore tax package, 419 to 0. To increase taxes, 
that is not an option.
  Spending Social Security, I think now the President has backed off 
spending the 40 percent of the Social Security surplus; and he has 
joined Republicans saying, okay, let us do what businesses do. Let us 
preserve 100 percent of it.
  So if we are not going to get money out of Social Security, and we 
agree on that and we are not going to get money out of raising taxes, 
then where are you going to get the money, Mr. Gore and Mr. Clinton, to 
spend more money on foreign aid?
  Now, I do not think we should spend more money on foreign aid. I 
think the foreign aid bill this year is one of the lowest bills we have 
had in many years. The taxpayers of America are fed up with foreign 
aid. I supported the package because it was a good reduction in foreign 
aid, but now Mr. Gore and Mr. Clinton want to raise it. We are saying, 
it cannot be gotten out of Social Security. It cannot be gotten out of 
taxes. The only thing that can be done is hold the line on spending, 
and we hope that they will join us in that effort.
  Mr. JONES of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. KINGSTON. I yield to the gentleman from North Carolina.
  Mr. JONES of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, when the gentleman was 
talking about foreign aid, it reminded me, he is very familiar with the 
fact that in my district, along with the district of the gentlewoman 
from North Carolina (Mrs. Clayton), we have had devastating floods; and 
the people in my district are asking me how can the President want to 
increase foreign aid when the people of eastern North Carolina as well 
as many farmers throughout this country that were devastated by 
drought, why we do not take some of that money and give it back to the 
taxpayer that is paying for this foreign aid.
  So I wanted just to thank the gentleman because I will say quite 
frankly, it is becoming an issue that I hear almost daily from the 
citizens of eastern North Carolina who have been devastated. They want 
some of this money that is going to foreign aid to stay here in America 
to help the taxpayer.

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