[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 40 (Friday, March 6, 2009)]
[House]
[Pages H3068-H3069]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 GOVERNMENT SPENDING AND HYPERINFLATION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Burton) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Madam Speaker, some people say, why are you 
guys down here every night taking Special Orders, talking about what's 
going on?
  I'll tell you why. I know we can't talk to the American people, but 
we need to make sure our colleagues, and if anybody is paying attention 
out there in the hinterlands, know what is going on in this place 
because it affects every person's life in America, every man, woman, 
and child.
  I have got a chart here, and this chart shows the money supply. It's 
hard for people to see back in their offices, but this is the money 
supply, and it's been pretty consistent all the way up through maybe 
1995, and since then it started to rise. That's the amount of money we 
print and is in circulation. Just after the 2007 time period, it shot 
straight up. It's going up like a rocket.
  Now, what does that mean? It means right now we have created currency 
in this country that's almost 300 percent of what it was just a year or 
two ago. So people say what difference does that make? If you print 
that much money, it won't hurt anything.
  But it does. Because the amount of goods and services, the cars, the 
refrigerators, and everything else that we

[[Page H3069]]

produce in this country, that's remaining flat right now because of the 
economy and the auto industry is going down. So we have got 300 
percent, three times the amount of currency in circulation, but we 
don't have the goods and services going up at the same rate. So what 
happens? That means the cost of everything is going up, and that's 
called inflation.
  Back in the 1970s we had inflation. It was double digit. It got up to 
14 percent, and that led to 12 percent unemployment, which is worse 
than what we have today. And we ended up raising interest rates 20 to 
21 percent because the spending had been out of control and we had to 
do something to slow down the inflation.
  So here we have. We have the money being printed so fast that they 
can't keep up with it. In fact, I don't know how they buy enough ink 
and paper down there at the Treasury Department to do this. But every 
man, woman, and child ought to be concerned about this because the cost 
of government is going up so rapidly and the printing of money is going 
up so rapidly that they are going to have hyperinflation in this 
country.
  My colleague Mr. Wolf from Virginia, I think he was here a couple 
weeks ago and he had a piece of currency from Zimbabwe and it was a 
multi-million piece of currency. They put so many zeroes on it, they 
had to reprint the currency just to take zeroes off. They just couldn't 
keep up with it.

                              {time}  1230

  Hyperinflation is what they had in Germany post-World War I. That is 
where people had to take bushels of money to the store to buy a loaf of 
bread, and every day the cost of everything went up this fast so that 
the people couldn't keep up with it.
  So what we are facing today is a government where spending is out of 
control. We spent $700 billion on the TARP program; $14 billion on the 
auto bailout; $787 billion on the stimulus, over $1 trillion if you add 
interest; $410 billion on the bill that is over in the Senate. We have 
a budget coming up with $3.9 trillion and a $635 billion down payment 
on health insurance, a national health insurance program, socialized 
medicine.
  Where is that money coming from? Well, we are borrowing it from 
China, we are borrowing it from Japan, we are borrowing it from other 
places in the world. We are borrowing it from the Social Security trust 
fund. But even though we are borrowing all that money, you can't keep 
up with the spending. And so what are they doing? They are printing 
more currency on a daily basis.
  So you see this rocket ship taking off in the currency area, and it 
is not going to slow down, and what it is going to do is just lead to 
very high inflation, the cost of living going up. And it is going to 
affect every family in this country. It is going to affect the cost of 
education, the cost of gasoline, the cost of electricity, everything 
else.
  So I hope my colleagues are aware of this. I hope they are aware that 
there are going to be a lot of tax increases as well. They are talking 
about putting a carbon dioxide tax in place that is $646 billion in new 
taxes. What that means is every time you switch on a light or buy a 
gallon of gas or do anything that is energy related, you are going to 
be paying a higher price for it because we are loading on the back of 
the taxpayers $646 billion in new taxes.
  We are spending more money than you can imagine. We are adding to the 
national debt $12.3 trillion. People can't understand what that is. A 
trillion is a million million, so $12 trillion is 12 million million 
dollars. We are adding $12.3 trillion to the national debt, and that is 
more than we have added to the national debt from 1789 when we became a 
free country and had our Constitution to today. We are blowing money 
like it is going out of style.
  When I tell people these things, their eyes just glaze over because 
it is too hard to comprehend. But what they do comprehend is higher 
taxes, more government spending, more pork-barrel projects and the kind 
of inflation that is going to lead this country down the road to 
socialism.
  What we need to do, Madam Speaker, as I end up, what we need to do is 
we need to cut spending, cut out the pork and cut taxes and let the 
free enterprise system work.

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