[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 7 (Wednesday, January 28, 2004)]
[House]
[Pages H227-H230]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      THE BUDGET AND FISCAL POLICY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Tancredo) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I cannot think of an issue that has 
commanded more attention on the floor of this House, and rightly so, 
probably since its inception, than the issue of the budget, and how 
much we should be spending, and how much we are going to spend. This 
year is no different in that regard in that there will be a great deal 
of attention paid to it and a lot of words expended on it.
  I am a member of the Committee on the Budget, and we are beginning 
that process today to write the budget resolution, that document that 
we then submit to Congress for its approval and will hopefully become 
sort of an outline for how we will spend the taxpayers' money in this 
next fiscal year.
  As we embark upon that project, we are given a lot of information to 
start our deliberations. I must say the information that we have been 
given this year, in just the last few days actually, is really quite 
startling. It prompts certainly me and I think it will prompt many 
other people to begin perhaps an early discussion of the issue of the 
budget and what we are in store for when we start looking at some of 
the implications of our fiscal policy.
  There is a friend of mine who is an ex-governor of the State of 
Colorado, and he is now teaching at the University of Denver in 
Colorado. He is teaching a class called Hard Choices, Difficult Choices 
I believe is the name of it. He presents his students with a variety of 
difficult questions they will have to answer from a public policy 
standpoint, what would they do if they were in our shoes.
  I cannot think of a more difficult task to put before anyone than to 
come up with the right decision when it comes to how much money we are 
going to be spending in the next fiscal year, how much money are we 
going to be taking away from our constituents not just today, but how 
much debt are we going to be giving our grandchildren and their 
grandchildren, and millions and millions and millions of Americans yet 
unborn. It is frightening, it is overwhelming, and I can understand why 
many Americans, perhaps even some of our colleagues here on the floor, 
would tend to just let all of this go over their heads saying this is 
overwhelming stuff, the numbers are so huge, I am just not going to 
focus on it that much. But I suggest that it is imperative that every 
single Member and every single citizen focus on these numbers and on 
the debt we are incurring and on the enormous amount of money we are 
spending even though we are not taking in the same amount of money in 
taxes.
  Let me preface my remarks by saying I am absolutely convinced that 
the problem here and that I am going to address in the next few minutes 
has nothing to do with the possibility that we are not taking enough 
money away from taxpayers. I believe that the tax rates, especially for 
folks in the middle- and upper-income tax rates are quite high, 
significant, and high enough, certainly.
  I think a case could be made that we are not taking enough from 
everyone in the country, every income earner. Some people have 
suggested that some sort of tax, there ought to be a minimum tax that 
anybody who makes any money has to pay because then they have a stake 
in the system. I think there is merit in that discussion, and I would 
like to have more of it. I think the people who are paying taxes are 
certainly paying enough taxes. The problem is not on that side of the 
ledger, as far as I am concerned. The problem is almost entirely on the 
other side of the ledger, the spending side of the ledger.
  The blame can be shared by every single Member, myself included. I do 
not stand here as someone who has never voted for a program increase. I 
certainly have. I have voted almost every time in the 5 years I have 
been here for the defense appropriations. We recently all had the 
opportunity to vote for the homeland security appropriations, and I 
have supported those. I believe, and I still believe, that the primary 
responsibility of the Federal Government is to protect and defend the 
people of this country and almost all of the other things that we do 
are extraneous to that particular purpose.
  Surprising as it is to many people, there is, of course, no 
requirement in the Constitution of the United States that the Federal 
Government provide funding for the education of children, although it 
is certainly a laudable goal. There is nothing in the Constitution that 
requires us to be doing probably 75 percent of what we do. It is not 
required. We are required to protect and defend, and that is why I have 
been willing to go along with increases in those budgets. But we have 
to make some very hard choices, very hard choices for all of us because 
we are at a point where the case could be made that the budget is out 
of control.
  We are now approaching $500 billion in deficits for the next fiscal 
year, and we can no longer think about this as something that we can 
get under control in the near future, that we can grow our way out of 
it or tax our way out of it. Those two things I do not believe are 
legitimate short-term goals.
  I certainly believe that the economy can be stimulated by a lot of 
the actions we have taken, including tax cuts; and I believe we are 
seeing some of that happen. I think there are a lot of indicators to 
suggest that the economy is recovering. We are noticing a growth in 
productivity, we are noticing a growth in manufacturing jobs, a general 
growth in the economy and economic activity for the third quarter of 
the last year, which I should say was almost historical, over 8 
percent. There are certainly some indicators that would suggest that 
the economy is getting stimulated and that we are beginning to see a 
growth even in the jobs category which has been the one that has been 
the most reluctant and most difficult to actually affect positively by 
our tax actions.
  However, I do not believe that growth will ever be enough to overcome 
the spending spree this Congress and past Congresses have been on, 
along with the administration.
  Something that was just given to Members not too long ago by the 
comptroller, and it was put out by the U.S. Accounting Office and the 
comptroller, is information that I know for a lot of people would be 
pretty darn boring stuff. When discussed, people think it is billions 
and trillions, what is relevant about it.

                              {time}  1745

  Again, I think it is really important for us to understand, Mr. 
Speaker, that

[[Page H228]]

some significant changes have occurred in spending patterns and habits 
of this Congress over the last couple of decades. I would actually say 
over the last, let us say, 40 years. We can condense this into just a 
very, I think, concise description of the problem.
  In 1963, the defense budget of this country was 48 percent. Almost 
one-half of the total budget of the Nation was spent on the defense of 
the Nation, 14 percent of the budget was spent on Social Security 
costs, 7 percent on interest, and 31 percent on all other things. That 
was in 1963, 40 years ago.
  Fast forward to 2003. The total budget for defense was 19 percent. It 
had fallen from half of what we spend in this Congress to 19 percent 
for defense. That is our primary responsibility, remember, the thing 
that we are supposed to do, 19 percent. But the budget for Social 
Security and Medicare had grown to 41 percent of the budget. Again, 
interest stayed about the same at 7 percent and all other spending 
again at 33 percent.
  So we see what happened here. We narrowed what we spent 
significantly, and a lot of people will claim that we are spending too 
much on the military, a claim that could be made, but just remember it 
is only 20 percent today as it was almost 50 percent of the total 
Federal budget 40 years ago.
  There is also something that is taking hold here; something that the 
American people have to understand is that a relatively small part of 
that budget that we fight about every year is in something we call 
discretionary programs. Those programs over which we have some control, 
how much we are going to appropriate every year, is a matter of debate 
and negotiation, but it has become a very, very small part of the 
budget.
  About a third of the budget actually falls into that category of 
discretionary spending. Two-thirds is spending on what are called 
mandatory programs. These are programs where the determination of how 
much we are going to spend is made by how many people become enrolled, 
how many people are eligible. That is Social Security, Medicare, and 
there are several other kinds of programs including certain veterans 
programs that are in this category of mandatory spending. It is sort of 
on autopilot.
  That has grown enormously over the last couple of decades, now 
commanding, as I say, two-thirds of the entire budget. And so that when 
we start talking about how to deal with the problem of the budget and a 
$500 billion deficit, it is impossible to talk about this in any 
meaningful way without addressing the issue of mandatory spending.
  Will we actually take that on is the question everybody really has on 
their minds. Will we have enough guts in this Congress and will the 
administration propose to actually do something about mandatory 
spending? Because we can talk about freezing the expenditures or 
reducing the rate of growth to a certain percent for all those things 
that are not mandatory, and it will have little if any real impact on 
the overall budget and on that debt that is presently held by the 
public.
  What is the debt, by the way? Debt that is held by the public today 
is $3.9 trillion. Add to that the debt of our trust funds like Social 
Security and that is $2.9 trillion for a total debt of $6.8 trillion. 
How does that figure out? How does that break down per person in this 
country, every man, woman and child? That is $24,000 apiece. If we add 
in everything that is not included in these things we call trust fund 
debt and public debt, but all the other expenditures that we have in 
the Congress and that really are just simply debt, but they are just 
not added for government purposes in the figure above, the burden per 
person rises to a little over $100,000.
  It goes on to say here in this GAO report that it amounts to a total 
unfunded burden of about $30 trillion in current dollars, which is 
roughly 15 times the current annual Federal budget and three times the 
current annual GDP.
  Okay. Lots of figures, lots of acronyms and pretty darn boring, I 
guess, to a lot of people, I know certainly to a lot of people. But I 
hope we can all understand that these hard choices we have to make will 
affect not just the quality of life of the people that we represent, 
but the quality of life that we are preparing, if you will, for our 
grandchildren and their children. It will be a significantly different 
quality of life unless we do something about this, unless we make some 
very hard choices this time around.
  I had a call just before the House adjourned for the day from a 
member of the media. It was a call with a question attached to it that 
I thought might have been a joke actually. I thought somebody was 
perhaps making a kind of bad attempt at some sort of humor. But I had a 
call, and there was a question from a reporter at a prestigious 
newspaper in the Nation. He said that in fact the President's budget, 
when it comes out here soon, will include, among other things, a 
significant increase in the National Endowment for the Arts.
  I say a joke because, of course, I could not believe that considering 
everything we have talked about here, considering the state we are in, 
the economic condition we are in, that we can be talking about 
significant increases in anything that we do in this Nation, let alone 
something like the National Endowment for the Arts. The reason why I 
think that this reporter was calling me is because I have tried year 
after year to strike funding for the National Endowment for the Arts as 
a frivolous expenditure and one that could never, I think, be justified 
based upon what it is that the Federal Government is supposed to be 
doing here. I have tried to make the case over and over again that art 
would survive even if we did not fund it, and that it was there and 
doing well even before the Federal Government began giving it $150 
million a year, and that there was really no need for Federal 
involvement in this issue, and that all of the arguments that could be 
made and were made on the floor during the debate over funding for the 
arts, they all went to the quality of life people had, to giving people 
inspiration, to making them feel different about themselves and about 
the world in which they lived.

  They were all really very commendable arguments. They were things 
that I think all of us would suggest would be good for us as Americans 
to be so inspired. But the question remains, what business is that of 
the Federal Government, and that we could make exactly the same case 
for a national endowment for religion, then we could form a panel and 
make them presidential appointments, and that we turn over to them the 
responsibility of distributing $150 million to various religious 
activities or religions in the country. Then when somebody asks which 
ones, we would say, that is up to the board to decide because we 
believe religion is a good thing and that it provides a quality-of-life 
experience and that it does inspire people and makes them feel better 
about the world in which they live.
  All those things are certainly true, but, of course, no one would 
agree, or I think very few people would agree that we actually needed a 
national endowment for religion. But it is all based on the same 
premise, that it is an appropriate function of the Federal Government.
  Of course, I suggest that it is not and have tried to strike the 
funding. That is why, as I say, the reporter called me.
  But apparently it is not a joke. Apparently that is going to be part 
of the President's budget. I certainly hope that request is not 
granted, and I certainly hope that we go far, far beyond that in saying 
that that is not going to be an indication of just how serious we are 
about fiscal responsibility, that we are not going to significantly 
increase the national endowment. We have to do something of major, 
major proportion in order to actually get a handle on this issue.
  Just to give Members an example of how scary things are, we could 
completely eliminate every single dime of discretionary funding, and we 
would probably still not be really close to getting to that balanced 
budget goal we have in the next 5 or so years. We could completely 
eliminate it, or at least, I should say, we could completely eliminate 
several major portions of it, including the amount we spend entirely on 
the military. We could eliminate the entire defense appropriation and 
not be in balance the next fiscal year. It just goes to show you how 
difficult the choices are that we are going to have to make. The 
question is, will we?

[[Page H229]]

  Time and time again, I have been involved in discussions, both on and 
off the floor of the House about this problem, how dramatic it is, how 
difficult it is going to be to deal with it; and time and time again 
the forces arrayed against spending are overwhelmed by the forces that 
are arrayed in favor of spending. Should our folks on the other side of 
the aisle chastise us for spending too much, which they certainly will, 
it is important to remember that during the debate on the budget last 
year that if you added up all of the amendments that were submitted by 
the minority side for additional spending, it would have approximated 
$900 billion of increased spending by amendments that were offered by 
the other side.
  So it is not as though we could look to the Democrats for any 
leadership in this area. They are being true to form and certainly 
spending restraint is not their strong suit. But it is not ours either, 
I must say. Certainly not if we look at the recent history of the 
Congress and of our spending habits, we have not been all that much 
better. I am sad to say that. But it is time, all right, to really 
think about how we are going to address this issue.
  And what are the hard choices we are willing to make? Are we actually 
willing to talk about things like Social Security containment, Medicare 
and Medicaid containment? Are we willing to talk about even significant 
reductions in other levels of discretionary spending? I am willing to 
look at everything, I will tell you right now, including a restraint on 
the spending in the Federal budget that goes to our defense 
establishment.
  I am concerned about a number of things that have happened recently. 
I am concerned that when we leave out big chunks of the budget, we make 
them sacrosanct and say we cannot go after those, we can go after 
everything else but we cannot go after defense, we cannot go after 
homeland security, that a lot of things get added to both of those 
budgets that are sometimes, I think, frivolous; and they get added to 
protect them from the budget scrutiny that would naturally be there if 
they were not in the category of defense or homeland security.
  I think those budgets will grow astronomically if they are left to be 
untouched by any sort of action of our Congress, of especially the 
Committee on the Budget.
  I am certainly willing to look at all of those things and to apply 
some sort of tourniquet on this hemorrhage that we are experiencing 
that is actually defined as spending. Because it is a spending problem. 
I want to reiterate that. It is a spending problem. It is not a 
taxation problem. It is spending.
  Remember the old sign that used to hang, I think, at a previous 
President's election headquarters? It said, ``It's the economy, 
stupid.'' So every single person answering the phone in his campaign 
headquarters would have to try to direct their answer to the question, 
no matter what the question was, and somehow they would try to deal 
with the economy or to make that part of the answer so that people 
would focus on the economy, which was in a slight recession at the 
time.
  We should perhaps put a great big sign around this House, maybe 
around the outside of the House and the inside of the House both that 
says, ``It's the spending, stupid,'' because it is the spending that we 
have to deal with. It is what we must get under control. As I say, I 
certainly do not speak from a holier-than-thou perspective. I know I 
have voted for increases in the past on various budget items. I also am 
saying that the time has come for us all to look very carefully at how 
we are going to address this very serious issue. There will be some 
very hard choices.
  Mr. Speaker, to tell you the truth, I do not know that we are up to 
the challenge. I have seen this happen before. There is a great deal of 
talk at this point in time about the need to do something, but at the 
point in time when push comes to shove and the rubber meets the road 
and all those other little things we throw in there to describe a tough 
situation, we will back away and the forces of spending will overwhelm 
the forces of moderation in this regard, including the budget process 
itself.

                              {time}  1800

  Everything in this body is built so as to construct an ever-expanding 
government with ever-greater costs. And I am not suggesting that it is 
done nefariously, that people are trying to figure out how to sink the 
government by spending us into oblivion. It is just simply the way the 
system works, and it is the nature of this Republic that we will 
represent the interests of our constituents as they are reflected by 
ever-increasing demands for certain services that the Federal 
Government does now and gets involved with.
  There are so many places to look for budget cuts; however, I want to 
encourage us to think about all of them; to leave nothing off the table 
including defense, including homeland security. I certainly for one, as 
I say, I am willing to look at all constraints because it is absolutely 
clear that there is no way to say we are going to simply freeze 
expenditures or we are going to have only a 1 percent increase in 
expenditures that are in this category nonmandatory, nondefense 
related, nonhomeland security related.
  Do my colleagues know what that comes down to? Squat. There is 
nothing there, Mr. Speaker. There is just this tiny little bit of the 
budget that then is eligible to be held in check, and it will do 
nothing except give us the rhetorical high ground. It will certainly 
not give us the moral high ground. We will be able to go out and say we 
froze the budget. We will not add all these other exceptions. We will 
be able to say that we only allowed a certain small percentage 
increase, but will we explain what that increase is in or what that 
constraint is in? No. We will just talk about it as being part of the 
budget process because most people frankly do not care.
  Most people are confused by these issues and want to turn off the 
message and certainly the messenger if we are talking about cutting 
them. But I am hoping that we can all do what needs to be done for the 
country because the consequences are dire; and as I said earlier, the 
choices are very hard. But we cannot shirk them. It is our 
responsibility, and so I hope that we will all undertake that with a 
most serious attitude because I just do not know how else we will 
accomplish our goal, Mr. Speaker.
  And the public, as I see the polls recently and the concerns being 
expressed and certainly from the information that we get in our office, 
the kinds of calls we get, I think that the public is at this point in 
time ready to say we need to do something even if it affects their 
favorite program. I guess we will see about that. But we get a lot of 
information now coming to us from our constituents talking about the 
budget as being a very serious topic to them and worried about these 
deficits and worried about our spending, and that is good. I am glad 
that it is actually getting out there to the point where people are 
focusing on this because it will take that kind of commitment, it will 
take a public that is supportive of our efforts to try to cut the 
budget for us ever to actually get the job done, and it will take 
talking to the public in terms that we can all understand and 
explaining to them and to us all, not just the general public but 
certainly to other Members, the importance of being more fiscally 
responsible and the dire consequences of huge deficits that go on for 
year after year after year.
  It is not as sexy a topic as many others that we could address, I 
know; and it is challenging to inspire the Nation to stand behind us as 
we try to cut spending. That is very difficult. It sounds so much 
better to stand up and say I want to do X, I want this program. It will 
solve so many problems. It will cure disease. Let us triple the budget 
for the NIH, for the National Institutes of Health. And people come 
into my office all the time with requests to increase funding for the 
research into particular diseases and searching for solution and a 
cure, and our heart goes out to them. They bring their children in with 
them, children afflicted with these horrible diseases; and we want to 
say yes, absolutely, certainly we will do that. I want to put all the 
money I can think of into curing this disease so their child will have 
the possibility of not just a productive life but life itself, and I 
want to do that. I mean, I certainly am susceptible to the same kinds 
of siren songs that all the rest of us are.
  Again, I am telling the Members I am not immune to the call for 
spending.

[[Page H230]]

So it is easier to say yes to them. It is easier to say yes to every 
person that comes into our office asking us for money for a certain 
project because they can make a great case. As long as I have been 
here, I can think of few times that I have been confronted by 
constituency groups or advocacy groups that do not make a good case for 
whatever it is they are trying to advance. They are, for the most part, 
I believe, very good people, all motivated by the best of intentions. 
And so it is so much easier to say to them, okay, I will do my best, 
yes, I will vote for an increase. And we all do it, and we have all got 
to reconsider it in light of what is happening in this country and in 
light of the very stark projections about where we go from here.
  And the President needs to do this also. He has to provide the 
leadership so that we can look to him and the administration for 
guidance and for the example that he can provide for fiscal constraint. 
So I am just hoping again that things like that that reporters call to 
me about the increase in the National Endowment for the Arts are simply 
trial balloons, as we say around here, and that they put them out just 
to see if there is any hope and, of course, if they see that there is 
not, it goes down. I hope that that is the case. I hope he is not 
serious.
  I certainly hope that the President comes to us with a budget more 
austere than the one I have been hearing about, and I hope those of us 
on the Committee on the Budget can muster the courage to present a 
budget resolution to this Congress that is austere, truly austere, that 
it does not just have the rhetorical flourish of budget freezes or 
restraints in the rate of growth and that sort of thing, but a true cut 
in spending because really this is the only way we will actually get to 
a balanced budget in the foreseeable future, or even if it is not a 
balanced budget, a more reasonable approach toward solving our fiscal 
crisis.
  So I just want to keep emphasizing I know I am certainly not the 
purest of the pure on this and cannot come to everybody with a holier-
than-thou attitude and say I never voted for an increase in the budget. 
I do not believe I ever voted for a tax increase. That is certainly 
true. But I cannot say I have never voted for an increase in the 
budget. I can tell the Members that there is little that I can think of 
today that would make me able to cast such a vote now in this budget 
cycle coming up, and I am going to do everything I can to make sure 
that the budget resolution that our committee reports is one that we 
can all be proud of from the standpoint that we can defend it, not just 
to our constituents but to our own consciences. That is a challenge for 
all of us.

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