[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 134 (Tuesday, October 24, 2000)]
[House]
[Pages H10805-H10806]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       MYTH OF THE BUDGET SURPLUS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Goodling). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 6, 1999, the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Taylor) 
is recognized for the remainder of the time until midnight.
  Mr. TAYLOR of Mississippi. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman 
from Texas (Mr. Stenholm) for joining me in this.
  Mr. Speaker, let me begin by thanking the gentleman from Pennsylvania 
(Mr. Goodling) for the great job he has done of serving our country 
over the many years. He has represented his District in Pennsylvania 
with great distinction, and we are all going to miss him, and he is a 
good sport to stay here so late tonight on what could possibly be the 
last week of his service to our Nation.
  Mr. Speaker, I really came to talk about the myth of the budget 
surplus. When folks stop me on the street back home, it is a very 
common question to ask me, where does their tax money go. Without 
exception, people are shocked to learn that the biggest expense to 
their Nation is interest on the national debt.
  See, today our Nation squandered $1 billion of your money on interest 
on the national debt. We did the same thing yesterday, the day before 
that, the day before that. We will do it tomorrow, the day after that. 
Every day for the rest of your life, your Nation will squander $1 
billion on interest on the national debt until we pay it off.
  That is pretty mind boggling. The biggest expense to our Nation last 
year, interest on the national debt, was $360 billion. So when we hear 
people talk about the surplus, we have got to kind of wonder where it 
all came from.
  I know one of the sources. It was an ad run in the paper, the USA 
Today, dated December 12, 1995. It is a photo of the former chairman of 
the Republican National Committee Hailey Barbour, who said ``Heard the 
one about the Republicans cutting Medicare? It is a million dollars 
challenge.''
  He offers a million dollars to someone who could prove the following 
statement false. ``Here is why you have no chance for the million 
dollars. Republican National Committee will present a cashier's check 
of $1 million to the first American who can prove the following 
statement is false: In November of 1995, U.S. House and Senate passed a 
balanced budget bill, period. It increases the total Federal spending 
on Medicare by more than 50 percent from 1995 to 2002, pursuant to the 
Congressional Budget Office standards. Responses must be postmarked by 
December 20, 1995.''
  So that was the budget that was going to be for the fiscal year of 
1996. The key here is, it said they passed a balanced budget bill. 
Congress can only appropriate money for 1 year at a time. So a balanced 
budget, as all of us know from our household checkbooks, is when we 
spend no more than we collect in taxes.
  It may surprise my fellow citizens, after the chairman of the 
Republican National Committee made such a statement and such a 
challenge that, in that year, the fiscal year increase to the public 
debt was $250,828,000,000. The Nation spent $250 billion more than they 
collected in taxes that year that they claim to have balanced the 
budget. So maybe it took a little bit longer than they thought.
  So in fiscal year 1997, the Nation spent $188,335,000,000 more than 
it collected in taxes. A year later, the Nation spent $113,046,000,000 
more than it collected in taxes. This is 3 years since Mr. Barbour's 
promise that the Nation had a balanced budget. The following year, the 
Nation spent $130,077,000,000 more than they collected in taxes.
  So when I presented Mr. Barbour with the information that it was not 
a balanced budget, his response was, not only not to pay me, but to sue 
me for answering his challenge that was in a nationwide publication. 
That is Republican accountability. That is Republican honesty. It makes 
one kind of wonder, does it not?
  In fairness to Mr. Barbour, that was not the only year. I think it is 
important that we be honest, that I be honest. I came to the House 
floor at the end of July and said that, for this fiscal year, so far, 
the Nation was running an $11 billion annual operating deficit. I came 
back in August, actually in the month of September, and showed where 
the Nation was running a $22 billion annual operating deficit.
  In fairness, I have to mention that something that I guess every 
Congressman should be at least partially happy about, we did finish the 
fiscal year that ended September 30, 2000 with an $8 billion surplus, 
but only after, incredibly, record collections of $157 billion and 
expenditures of $125 billion. See, they were able to slow down spending 
for that 1 month to make up for that $22 billion.
  One of the ways they slowed down spending, interestingly enough, we 
hear all this talk about being for a strong national defense, is they 
delayed the pay for the troops from the last of September to the 1st of 
October. So that bill did not go towards last year, it goes towards 
this year. So this year's deficit will be even bigger. But last year's 
deficit turned into a surplus by that accounting gimmick and others.
  So I guess something that I am very proud of, having run on the basis 
of trying to balance the budget, is that, for the first time in what we 
think is 30 years, the Nation ran the smallest of surpluses, about $8 
billion out of a $1.5 trillion budget.
  We hear talk of big surpluses. But those surpluses are all in the 
trust funds: the Social Security Trust Fund, the Medicare Trust Fund, 
the Military Retirees Trust Fund, the Black Lung Trust Fund, the 
Federal Employees Trust Fund. These are all monies that have been 
collected for a special purpose, and people trust us to set that money 
aside and spend it only for that purpose. To spend it on anything else, 
to give it away to someone else in a tax break is a violation of that 
trust.
  Someone who has understood the issue of the tax breaks and their 
impact on the Federal trust funds better than anyone else in this House 
is the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Stenholm).
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Stenholm).
  Mr. STENHOLM. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding to me. 
I thank him for taking this time.
  I will serve notice to our colleagues that we are going to be doing a 
lot of talking about this over the next 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 days. 
Tomorrow we will pass a rule that will provide for six 24-hour 
continuing resolutions. Just as the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. 
Taylor) has talked very accurately about the last 12 months, what is 
seemingly passing over this body and the leadership of this House is 
what we are doing in the next 12 months.
  The 106th Congress is on track to increase appropriations, spending, 
for domestic programs at the fastest rate this year since the budget 
act was first passed in 1974.

                              {time}  2345

  Now, all year long my friend from Mississippi and I and other Blue 
Dogs have been on this floor calling for a compromise in the budget 
that can be supported by both sides of the aisle. The Republican budget 
called for $600 billion in budget authority and $625 billion in 
outlays. The President proposed $624 billion in budget authority and 
$637 billion in outlays and colleague after colleague from the other 
side of the aisle has bent over speaking and decrying the big spending 
of this administration. Only yesterday the Senate appropriations 
committee chairman, Mr. Stevens, proposed a compromise discretionary 
cap of $637 billion in budget authority and $645 billion in outlays in 
order to get us out of here. That is $8 billion more than the President 
has proposed to spend this year. The blame game is going on now. We 
have heard just tonight from both sides of the aisle about who is at 
fault and who is doing what, and as my colleague has pointed out, we 
spent a good

[[Page H10806]]

part of this year on how big our tax cuts were going to be.
  Completely overlooked in all of this discussion and debate for the 
last 3 or 4 months is what we are actually doing on spending. According 
to the Concord Coalition, with what we are about to do under the 
leadership of the House, two-thirds of this projected surplus for the 
next 10 years, two-thirds will have already been spent before we 
adjourn either Saturday, Sunday, Monday or Tuesday. Two-thirds will 
have been spent. I do not understand my friends in the leadership of 
this House that somehow believe that you can take individual spending 
bills absolutely in a blind trust of just saying because we are doing 
13 individual spending bills that the sum total does not add up to what 
we are talking about tonight; just as my friend from Mississippi 
accurately points out that we barely ran a surplus this past year, and 
there is credit on both sides of the aisle that are deserving for that, 
and I readily grant my friends on the other side of the aisle their 
share of the credit for that. But I do not understand how we can see 
some of the charts and posters that we will see over the next several 
days bragging about this history while at the same time we are spending 
it for next year.
  We are going to talk about raising the caps and we are going to try 
to slip it on to another bill tomorrow, finally acknowledging that the 
caps that we put in in the 1997 balanced budget agreement were 
unrealistic. I wish we were going to do more than 1 year. In fact, we 
will be on the floor tomorrow and the next day and the next day saying, 
``Let's put another 5-year realistic cap on spending. Let's not just do 
it for one year.'' And oh, by the way, when we talk about the spending 
and the blame game starts around, let me point out, according to 
Senator John McCain, $21 billion of this $645 billion which is $8 
billion more than the President proposed that we spend, $21 billion of 
that is for add-on earmarks that my colleagues on both sides of the 
aisle are bragging about on a regular basis.
  I think it is going to be interesting when the smoke finally clears 
and we see where that $21 billion was spent, how much that is going to 
detract from the $2.3 billion non-Social Security surplus that we will 
have to deal with in the next Congress, and as we listen to both 
candidates for President, where are we going to find the money to have 
the tax cuts that one proposes or the spending increases that the other 
proposes when this Congress willhave already spent the money? And as my 
colleague from Mississippi points out, we are getting carried away with 
these surpluses. We just barely got into the black this last year when 
we consider all of the obligations that we have in this body to future 
generations.
  Mr. TAYLOR of Mississippi. Again for those of you on the West Coast, 
this is almost 10 minutes to midnight in Washington so I not only thank 
my colleague for staying up so late but all the employees of the House.

  I know there is a lot of mistrust about government. I would ask 
people who question these numbers to 
access their computers www.publicdebt.treas.gov and look for yourself. 
One of the big lies is that the public debt is going down. The fact of 
the matter is in the 1 year between September 30 of 1999 and September 
30 of 2000, the public debt increased from $5,656,271,000,000 to 
$5,674,178,000,000. I realize that is pretty mind-boggling for almost 
everyone, but that is what it looks like on a chart. It continues to go 
up. And again as long as we owe money, we have to pay interest on that 
debt just like every other business and every other individual and that 
interest payment is $1 billion a day. If you want to access these 
numbers, it is www.publicdebt.treas.gov/opd.opdpenny.htm.
  Folks, that is what your debt looks like today. So before any of my 
colleagues talk about huge spending increases or any presidential 
candidate, or any of my colleagues start talking about huge tax cuts, 
this is what we owe. If you were to look at this in 1980, it would have 
read about $1 trillion instead of 5. That means that $4.674 trillion of 
that debt has been added in this generation's lifetime.
  I as a father am not going to stick my kids with my bills. I would 
ask that those people who seek the highest office of the land, the 
President of the United States, do not stick their kids with their 
bills. I would ask that my fellow Congressmen and the Members of the 
other body, do not forget these numbers and let us not stick the next 
generation of Americans with this generation's bills. Before we talk 
about big spending increases, before we talk about big tax cuts, let us 
pay off the debt that has been run up in our lifetime and let us start 
defending the Nation in a way that in reality matches the rhetoric.
  I would tell the gentleman from Texas that when the Republican 
majority took over Congress, there were 392 ships in the American 
fleet. Today the number of ships in the United States Navy are 318. 
They talk about the big defense increases, but as a matter of fact the 
last 6 years that the Democrats ran the House, we funded 56 new 
warships. In the first 6 years that they have run the House, they 
funded only 33. For all the rhetoric about being tough on defense, good 
for defense, the Republican Congress built fewer ships in their first 6 
years than the Democrats did in our last 6. Even this year they talk 
about President Clinton being weak on defense. President Clinton asked 
the Congress to fund eight ships. The Congress only funded six. The 
United States Navy is now the smallest it has been since 1933. So in 
addition to not balancing the budget, they have failed to look out for 
the common defense.
  Mr. Barbour, I hope you are watching tonight. I have still got your 
ad; you have still got my letter. You still owe me a million dollars. I 
realize you found a judge up here in Washington that said, yeah, that 
wasn't really for real, but when someone runs a statement in a national 
publication challenging people to prove them false and have their 
statements proved false not just for 1 year or even 2 years but for 1 
year, 2 years, 3 years, 4 years running, then I have proven your 
statement false. And if you are a man of your word and if your party is 
a party of its word since you are making such a big deal of credibility 
and honesty and trustworthiness, then I think you ought to keep your 
word and honor your pledge. For my part, after I paid the lawyer that I 
had to go hire because you sued me, the remainder will go to the 
University of Southern Mississippi so we can educate a lot of good kids 
back home.

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