[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 85 (Tuesday, June 9, 2009)]
[House]
[Pages H6311-H6312]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




        ``THE STATE OF THE UNION'S FINANCES, A CITIZEN'S GUIDE''

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Indiana (Mr. Burton) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Madam Speaker, Members of Congress in the 
House and the Senate get literature sent to them every single day. In 
fact, we probably get four or five books a week. I don't know how many 
little leaflets and pamphlets we're asked to read, but we don't have 
time to read them all. We ask our staff to read some of them, but we 
don't have a chance to really get into the minutiae of some of these 
brochures.
  Our colleagues in both the House and the Senate got this little 
booklet called ``The State of the Union's Finances, a Citizen's 
Guide.'' These are going to be given, I guess, to people all across 
this country. I hope every one of my colleagues and everybody in 
America gets a chance to read this little booklet. Now, this was sent 
to us by our colleagues Frank Wolf, Republican of Virginia, and Jim 
Cooper, Democrat of Tennessee. I just want to read to you a little bit 
about the situation that America faces, because Americans right now, I 
don't think, are really aware of the fiscal problems we're facing.
  As of the fall of 2008, we had $12.2 trillion in explicit 
liabilities. That's publicly held debt, military and civilian pensions, 
retiree health benefits, and others things related to that. We had $1.3 
trillion in debt for Federal insurance, loan guaranties, leases, and so 
forth, and we had a $42.9 trillion debt from Medicare hospital 
insurance, Medicare outpatient services, Medicare prescription drugs, 
and Social Security. That's a total of $56.4 trillion in debt that we 
have right now, today. That amounts to $184,000 of debt for every man, 
woman, and child in this country; it amounts to $435,000 of debt for a 
full-time worker; for each household, it amounts to $483,000 in debt. 
That's the national debt today.
  George Washington said we should avoid ungenerously throwing upon 
posterity, our kids, the burden we, ourselves, ought to bear. In 1796, 
they had a deficit, and George Washington said that we can't allow this 
to happen because we don't want to leave a burden to our kids and to 
our grandkids by spending too much money.
  I'm telling you right now, colleagues and anybody else who is paying 
attention, what we're going to leave our kids and our grandkids is 
something that they will curse us for because they're going to have to 
pay extremely high taxes, and the inflationary problems that they're 
going to face are going to be insurmountable.

[[Page H6312]]

  I can't believe that we're doing this right now. We're talking about 
a national health care program that's going to add additional trillions 
of dollars. We're talking about bailouts to the financial institutions 
and to the auto industry. We're talking about a cap-and-trade program 
that's going to increase the cost of every family in America between 
$3,000 and $4,000 to turn on their lights or to buy gasoline at a 
service station or anything else that produces energy. We're adding 
about $2 trillion a year to this debt, and it's unsustainable. It is 
going to affect every man, woman, and child who is living in America 
today, but what it's going to do to future generations is unbelievable.
  We can destroy this Republic if we don't get control of spending. 
This is a political hyperbole. I'm telling you right now that we can 
destroy this form of government and this civilization we have, just 
like Rome did, if we don't get control of spending. It is out of 
control. It is out of control. We're $56 trillion in debt today, and 
we're adding $2 trillion a year, plus all of these additional programs 
we're coming up with. In the next 5 years, they say we're going to 
spend an additional $5 trillion. We don't have it, so we're putting 
this burden on our kids and on our grandkids.
  It's wrong. We have to do something about it. We have to do it now. 
We have to start getting our spending in order. My Republican and 
Democrat colleagues understand that. Mr. Wolf is a Republican who sent 
this out, and Mr. Cooper is a Democrat. They understand it. We all 
ought to understand it.

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