[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 42 (Tuesday, March 10, 2009)]
[House]
[Pages H3128-H3129]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   CUT GOVERNMENT SPENDING AND TAXES

  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, the Washington Post the other 
day commented about the President's support of the $410 billion omnibus 
spending bill that's crawling through the Senate, and they said that it 
borders on the irresponsible for the administration to try to blame 
this on last year's administration because they are the ones that are 
going to sign the bill into law and spend the money.
  In another newspaper here in Washington D.C., the Washington 
Examiner, they wrote ``In quick succession, (President) Obama rolled 
out a $2 trillion financial services bailout, $2 trillion, a $788 
billion stimulus package, the $13.4 billion preliminary bailout for 
automakers, a $410 billion spending plan to cover the rest of the 
current fiscal year, a proposed $275 billion foreclosure rescue plan, 
and a $3.5 trillion budget that includes a $634 billion fund for health 
care.''
  People in America, their eyes glaze over when they hear this. 
Trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars that we don't have are 
going to be spent for all of these programs.
  And so people say, well, how are you going to solve the economic 
problems facing this country if you don't spend that money? If we spend 
the money, we are not going to solve the problems. The economic 
conditions will continue to go in the wrong direction, but we will be 
loading on the backs of our kids and grandkids and future generations, 
higher inflation and higher taxes and a quality of life that won't be 
anything like what we have today.
  The key to solving these problems is to cut government spending, and 
to cut

[[Page H3129]]

taxes for every American so they have more disposable income, and to 
cut taxes on capital gains so people will take stocks, bonds and 
property they have and sell it and reinvest it someplace else, thus 
creating money for investment in business and industry so they can 
create jobs and cut business taxes across the board.

                              {time}  1445

  If we did those three things, we would have an immediate movement 
toward improvement in our economy, and we wouldn't be doing it by 
loading trillions and trillions of dollars on the backs of our kids and 
grandkids.
  This chart here shows what's happened in the last several years as 
far as the growth in the money supply. It was pretty consistent up 
until the year 2000, and now it's going straight up. That means to 
every single American that the cost of living is going to go up because 
there's more money in circulation, fewer goods and services, and the 
cost of everything is going to rise because of the inflation that's 
created by printing all this money.
  John F. Kennedy said that the way to solve these problems--back in 
the early sixties, a Democrat--that it was to cut taxes. Here's exactly 
what he said. ``Our true choice is not between tax reduction, on the 
one hand, and the avoidance of large Federal deficits on the other. It 
is increasingly clear that no matter what party is in power, so long as 
our national security needs keep rising, an economy hampered by 
restricted tax rates will never produce enough revenues to balance our 
budget, just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits. In 
short, it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today, and 
tax revenues are too low, and the soundest ways to raise the revenues 
in the long run is to cut taxes now.''
  The best way to raise revenues for the Treasury is to cut taxes. The 
best way to stimulate economic growth is to cut taxes. Yet, this 
administration is going to be raising taxes in one way or another on 
every single family in this country, either through the tax that is 
going to be on energy or the taxes they are going to levy on the upper 
income people. But there's going to be taxes levied on every single 
American, and that is the wrong way to stimulate economic growth.
  What they are doing is they are throwing money at this problem, 
saying that that will solve the problem. It has never worked in the 
past. It will not work now.
  Back in the 1970s, under Jimmy Carter, this was tried. And we ended 
up with double-digit inflation--14 percent inflation, 12 percent 
unemployment--and they ended up raising interest rates to 21.5 percent 
to stop the runaway inflation that was killing the economy of the 
United States, and they put us into another real bad recession. It 
wasn't until Reagan came in in 1980 and cut taxes across the board that 
we ended up with the longest period of economic recovery in the United 
States history.
  History shows that cutting taxes in times of economic stress is the 
way to work our way out of this situation. And throwing money, 
trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars, and move us toward a 
socialistic economy, is not the solution.
  I hope my colleagues will look into history. Look at what John F. 
Kennedy, what Ronald Reagan, and others said about this, because it's 
extremely important that we profit from history.

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