[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 43 (Wednesday, March 31, 2004)]
[House]
[Pages H1765-H1766]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           OUR NATIONAL DEBT

  Mr. POMEROY. Madam Speaker, I want to follow up on comments recently 
advanced by my colleague from Hawaii, someone who has so quickly thrown 
himself, tried to make some sense of them, and I appreciate very much 
the gentleman's conclusions.
  We have got a runaway debt. We have got a very serious financial 
situation facing this country.
  We are all familiar with the concept of credit card limits. Maybe we 
get pretty little limits. Maybe we get even generous limits. But 
somewhere there is a limit on how much money we can run up on our 
credit card.
  The Nation, similarly, Congress establishes the limit, the credit 
card limit, for the Federal Government. We do that by a vote of 
Congress, how much money we are allowed to borrow as a country. And we 
have got a limit of $7.384 trillion, $7.384 trillion. We are allowed to 
borrow that much as a Nation.
  That might give one pause. One might wonder how in the world are we 
going to get that debt paid off before we all leave the workforce, 
retire, and turn the country over to our children. Surely it would not 
be fair to leave our children with this debt.

[[Page H1766]]

  As bad as this credit card limit is, as troubling as it ought to be 
to all of us, $7.384 trillion, I have got very bad news for the 
Members. In the budget conference presently underway in the bowels of 
the Capitol, there will be an additional borrowing authority added to 
this country. The bill, the budget bill, to come out of conference to 
be voted on by the House of Representatives, will raise the credit card 
limit for our Nation. We do not know how much because no one is talking 
about this in public. No one wants the American people to realize that 
$7.384 trillion is not enough, that we are going to raise it even more 
by $1 trillion, more by $2 trillion. One projection that we have seen 
from the majority would take the credit card limit of this Nation over 
$10 trillion.
  One of the things I think that is lost in financial debates is these 
numbers get too big and one really does not know what they mean. They 
are just enormous. I went recently to an instruction course on how to 
teach mathematics. And the presenter said 1 trillion, do we know how 
many seconds are in 1 trillion? If we took 1 trillion seconds, we would 
go back in time 16,000 years. So obviously 1 trillion is a staggering 
number, and we are now finding that, under the budget plans of the 
majority party and the administration that drive this national debt 
ever higher, $7.384 trillion is not enough. I think the American people 
had better say it is enough.
  We do not as families, we do not as families plan our financial 
affairs where mom and dad run up the credit cards, happily thinking the 
kids will pay them off. I know of families that I represent much like 
the family that raised me, just an awful lot of sacrifice in the mom 
and dad to leave things better for the kids, not tipping it on its head 
where we really do not care what happens afterwards, after we are gone.
  If that is how we operate as families, as moms and dads worrying 
about making things better for our children, why should this Nation 
representing all the moms and dads in this country be running it a way 
so significantly different? Why should this Nation run up a debt like 
there is no tomorrow? Because there is a tomorrow, and it will be our 
children's tomorrow, and our children's tomorrow will be diminished by 
the fact that this generation is refusing to pay its way.
  I am going to vote against the budget that comes out of conference 
because I believe it is wrong, absolutely wrong, to raise the borrowing 
limit for this country, leaving more debt for our children, when there 
is no plan anywhere in terms of how we ever get out of this mess.
  The minority advanced a plan that brought us to a balanced budget in 
about 8 years. Some might think that is just not fast enough. That was 
a very difficult task. That is how far in the hole we now are. But the 
majority budget does not have any plan at all. And that is why they 
want to raise the debt, and that is why their budget should be 
rejected. We owe it to our children to get our Nation's finances back 
on track.

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