[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 41 (Thursday, March 13, 2003)]
[House]
[Pages H1888-H1889]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          THE BLUE DOG BUDGET

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mrs. Blackburn). Under the Speaker's 
announced policy of January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. 
Boyd) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority 
leader.
  Mr. BOYD. Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak, and I 
appreciate the remarks of the gentleman from Michigan who preceded me. 
I think I see a great glimmer of hope here, that those of us who are in 
different parties can come to the floor of the House of Representatives 
and essentially preach the same message.
  That is what I want to do here today. I want to follow up on what the 
gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Smith) says and tell the House that I 
believe that it is unconscionable that we are entering this time of 
war, this pending war, when we are economically in the doldrums. We 
have higher unemployment rates than we have had for years and years. 
Just 2 short years ago we had a surplus in our Federal budget, and in a 
very short 2 years we have managed to deplete that surplus and create 
the biggest deficit in the history of this Nation.

                              {time}  1715

  I think the results of that, the consequences of that, are certainly 
unacceptable to me and should be unacceptable to most Americans because 
I think what it does for us in the long run, the long-term economic 
consequences of it are very serious. It will stagnate our economy. It 
will make it impossible to solve the long-term Social Security problem 
that we have that the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Smith) spoke about. 
It will make it almost impossible for us to put in place a prescription 
drug program.
  Both presidential candidates on the campaign trail talked about that 
as one thing that this Congress should do, reform Medicare to include a 
prescription drug program. But sometimes as a Congress and as an 
administration, we seem so fixated on revenue reductions that we have 
to pay for the priorities that we may list as a Federal Government.
  Those priorities are pretty simple. Our primary responsibility is 
national security. There is a new buzzword, homeland security, that has 
been created since 9/11, and we know that the world is changing and we 
have to react to that. That is the primary responsibility of the 
Federal Government is national security.
  We have Social Security, which is a very important program to the 
success of this society over the last 40 or 50 years. I tell my 
constituents often that in 1964 about the time of the creation of the 
Medicare program, if an American reached the age of 65 in this Nation, 
there was a 58 percent chance they would be below the poverty level. In 
other words, 58 percent of our citizens that reached that age, 
retirement age, did fall below the poverty level.
  That figure today is a single digit figure, less than 10 percent 
reach the age of 65 and fall below the poverty level. There are many 
reasons for that sort of success in having the retired generation of 
this Nation live in comfort, but the least of those reasons certainly 
is not that we have a great Social Security and Medicare program in 
place. We know those programs have long-term funding problems, and we 
have to find solutions for them.
  I think many of us in the Blue Dogs felt we had that opportunity 2 
years ago when we had a surplus to fix those programs long term so that 
our children and grandchildren would not be hung with the 
responsibility of fixing those programs because it is going to be a 
much, much more difficult fix 15 or 20 years down the road. The fixes 
are painful now, but not nearly as painful as they will be in 15 or 20 
years.
  The Blue Dogs have always focused on fiscal responsibility and tried 
to convince this Congress that the best thing we can do for this 
economy is to set our priorities, spending priorities, and be willing 
to pay for those in our own generation. That is really what our Blue 
Dog budget is all about, it is about getting the Federal Government 
back onto a glide path of fiscal responsibility.
  We spent the whole decade of the 1990s trying to bring us out of the 
huge deficit years of the 1970s and 1980s. It was a long, difficult 
battle. There were spending cuts. We ratcheted down spending at every 
level of government. The facts, if they are spoken accurately, will 
bear that out. Now in just a few short years of fiscal 
irresponsibility, we put ourselves back into a deep, deep ditch.
  Madam Speaker, we have some other folks joining us today, and I would 
like at this time to yield to the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. 
Tanner), who is a very effective member of the Committee on Ways and 
Means, who will discuss a few details of the Blue Dog budget.
  Mr. TANNER. Madam Speaker, I think the gentleman is correct in his 
assessment that our generation ought to be willing or have the courage 
to

[[Page H1889]]

pay the bills that we are incurring for our protection and for the 
protection of our children and not pass on a debt that we have been 
working on to the extent that we are.
  Let me give Members a few facts which are painful to even read. Right 
now we, the people of the United States, owe about $6.4 trillion as 
represented by our national debt. Even worse, 8 months ago Congress was 
called on to raise the debt ceiling; that is the amount of money that 
the people of the United States borrow. Eight months ago, we raised 
that debt ceiling $450 billion, which represents almost 10 percent of 
the then-$6 trillion debt. Do Members realize that 8 short months later 
we are told by the Secretary of the Treasury we are going to hit that 
ceiling in the next few days or weeks. That means we have run through 
in 8 months $450 billion of additional debt.
  It gets worse. The Congressional Budget Office last week reported 
that the deficit for this year would be $287 billion, and that does not 
include any monies for a potential war in Iraq. CBO further predicted 
that the deficits over the next 10 years if we continue to follow the 
economic model that we are operating under right now and do the things 
the President has suggested with regard to the Tax Code, that over the 
next 10 years we will rack up almost $2 trillion of additional debt.

  Now any rational businessperson understands that such an economic 
business plan, either in their business or for the country's business, 
is unsustainable; and the reason it is unsustainable is because 
interest must be paid on this debt. Last year we, the people of this 
country, paid $332 billion, paid and accrued $332 billion of interest 
on the national debt. The revenue of the Federal Government last year 
was $1.8 trillion. That means we have a debt tax, D-E-B-T, debt tax of 
18 cents out of every dollar. Said another way, we have an 18 percent 
mortgage on our country and this debt tax, as we continue to borrow 
more and more money, is the only tax increase on the American people 
that cannot be repealed because interest has to be paid.
  This does not even touch the moral argument of what we are doing to 
the next generation. I told somebody the other day, I said I do not 
think any of us in this room want to leave our children a country where 
the rivers and streams are so polluted that fish cannot live in it, 
kids cannot swim in it, and people cannot drink from them. I do not 
think anyone wants to leave our children a country where the air is so 
foul and smog infested that our children have to wear a surgical mask 
to ride their bicycle, and I do not think any of us want to leave our 
children a nation that is so burdened with debt that they will not be 
able to make the public investments that only the government can make 
to enable private enterprise to grow, expand and flourish.
  If there is any businessperson in this country who thinks for one 
moment that private enterprise can flourish and grow without public 
infrastructure investment, whether it be in bricks and mortar, 
airports, railroads, harbors on our rivers and streams, or anything 
else, interstate highways. If they think private business can grow and 
flourish without that kind of public investment, then they have never 
been to a country that does not have any government because in those 
countries, nobody is doing any good. I have been there, seen that.
  So I want to just say that under our present scheme if we listen to 
some, the deficits do not matter, that this is just a short-term 
problem. People have tried since the dawn of civilization and the 
invention of something we call money to borrow themselves rich. It has 
never worked then, and it is not working now, and anybody who thinks 
that we can borrow ourselves rich expects what never was and never will 
be.
  We have a serious problem in this country. We are not doing our 
children right by passing on such a debt to them because we do not have 
the courage to either raise the necessary revenue for what we want, or 
we do not have the political courage to cut spending where we can. 
Something has got to be done, and that is why the Blue Dogs came today 
with a new budget for this fiscal year that will get us back on a glide 
path to balance. The biggest gift we could give to our country and to 
our children is a country that is debt free.
  Just think, if we did not pay $332 billion in interest last year what 
we could do, either cut taxes or make the investments in education, in 
a world class military, in all of those things without ever raising 
taxes again. That is the kind of financial management I think people 
expect us to exhibit up here, rather than trying to borrow ourselves 
rich and tell them everything is going to be all right.
  Madam Speaker, I just want to say that I hope people will give some 
consideration to the God-awful debt that this country possesses now and 
what is forecast for the future, and will help us as we try to wrestle 
with it.
  Mr. BOYD. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Tennessee. 
Members can tell he is truly our leader on these kinds of budget 
issues, and a very thoughtful member.

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