[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 146 (Tuesday, November 14, 2000)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2093-E2094]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          GOVERNMENT SPENDING

                                 ______
                                 

                     HON. MARSHALL ``MARK'' SANFORD

                           of south carolina

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, November 14, 2000

  Mr. SANFORD. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to leave in the record a few 
thoughts about where we are, and where we are going, with regard to 
government spending. Milton Friedman once said that the only real 
measure of government's size is what it spends. I had a hunch that he 
was right when I came to Washington, having been here for six years I 
am now certain he is correct.
  It's not collusion, or a conspiracy, but unfortunately political 
forces regularly come together to mask the real size of government. 
Taxes may sit below the real cost of sustaining a program. That's 
happening now with Social Security where the $9 trillion liability, if 
annualized, would mean payroll taxes closer to 17% than 12%. Money can 
also be borrowed--we have $5 trillion in government debt, a great part 
of this went to consumption rather than investment--and as such 
basically means that the current generation handed the bill to the next 
for government services they enjoyed.
  Friedman's historical argument is reinforced by the federal 
government's growth over the last 5 years. When I arrived in Washington 
in 1995 the federal government spent abut $1.5 trillion per year. It 
now spends almost $1.9 trillion per year. Washington looks, feels, and 
acts like a great spending machine, and I have seen first hand the 
tremendous bias toward spending inherent in our system of government. 
Few people take a trip to Washington because they want nothing from it, 
and you see this in several ways.
  First, regular folks from back home come up--they admire what I have 
done and said on government spending and even say keep it up--but there 
is always this ``one'' program they want to tell you about. If you add 
up all the ``one'' programs--railroad retirement funding, money to fix 
the Pinckney historic site in Mount Pleasant, a new line item for 
firefighters, the local disabilities or humanities board's push for un-
offset additional funding, etc, you get to a lot of money. These are 
your friends, the last thing in the world you want to do is say no.
  Second, formal lobbies say basically the same things, but you didn't 
grow up across the street from the man or woman making their case. They 
sweeten their argument with a big PAC check or 1,000 letters of support 
from everyone on their mailing list. They are extremely effective. An 
example of this would be the sugar lobby. With the exception of maybe 
ten Congressional districts where sugar is the dominant crop, no one in 
the Congress could make the case for our sugar price support system 
without being laughed or booed out of the room. This system costs 
American consumers $1 billion a year in the form of higher sugar 
prices, and all this benefit gets handed down to truly a few--roughly 
60 domestic sugar producers. The largest of these is the Fanjul family, 
who get $60 million a year of personal benefit as a result of the 
program. They are not
  Finally, government watches out for its own. The military very 
effectively uses government dollars to turn around and lobby Congress 
for more. I don't mind because I see the military as a core function of 
the federal government, but when our office went after the East West 
Center, I was disturbed to see public monies

[[Page E2094]]

used to craft responses used in defeating our efforts. Similarly, when 
I went after OPIC with Tom Campbell the organization's intelligence was 
so good that I was getting calls from Mark Irwin and Dennis Baake. Mark 
I have only met a time or two at Renaissance Weekend. Dennis I have 
known for years; he uses OPIC funding with his company AES, but we have 
never before talked about OPIC. I still don't know how OPIC figured out 
I knew both these guys.
  The bottom line is that we have a problem with spending in Washington 
and what this spending points to is even worse. In the early 1800's a 
little known Scottish historian after studying World History for the 
whole of his life said this:
  ``A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government it can 
only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves 
largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority 
always vote for the candidates promising the most benefits from the 
public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over 
loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average of 
the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations 
have progressed through this sequence:
  from Bondage to Spiritual Faith;
  from Spiritual Faith to Great Courage;
  from Great Courage to Abundance;
  from Abundance to Selfishness;
  from Selfishness to Complacency;
  from Complacency to Apathy;
  from Apathy to Dependency;
  from Dependency back again into Bondage.''
  Tragically Alex Tyler's words have been born out by the history of 
the world.
  Egyptians, advanced as they were, came and went--the Greeks laid the 
intellectual foundation for many of our government's practices but did 
the same. Rome, after controlling the entire known world, came to an 
end in 476 AD. The Byzantine Empire was around for another thousand 
years but ultimately crumbled as well in 1453. Italy, which dominated 
as the cultural center of the western world during the Renaissance, 
fell to Charles V in 1550 and Spain controlled one-fourth of the known 
world and one-half of
  There are other examples, but a good part of each of these countries' 
or civilizations' end was tied to government overspending. Spain at the 
time of collapse spent forty cents of every dollar of government 
expenditure on interest payments which is unsustainable for a person or 
a country. Can you imagine spending forty cents of every dollar you 
earned to cover the tab on your credit card?
  The bottom line is that I believe the biggest threat we have to 
National Security is our government's excessive spending. I have cast 
more than my share of votes against even suspensions and anything else 
that had much in the way of spending, but I have seen nothing 
structural to suggest people are willing to put the brakes on spending. 
This troubles me for our country's future. Oddly, the next economic 
slow-down may be our nation's best hope in efforts to attempt to put a 
bridle on the federal government's spending, but currently it doesn't 
look good. For the sake of our Republic, I hope the elected leadership 
of this country wakes up to the need to do something sooner rather than 
later because time is beginning to run short in solving what could 
shortly prove to be a math trap against each of us as taxpaying 
Americans.

                          ____________________