[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 156 (Monday, October 26, 2009)]
[House]
[Pages H11770-H11771]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        CONTROLLING THE DEFICIT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Inglis) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. INGLIS. Madam Speaker, we are looking at some scary numbers. Just 
in time for Halloween, we have the budget deficit numbers in; $1.42 
trillion for this year and an accumulated debt of $13 trillion.
  Now, this has happened before. We have been in a spot before with 
historical debt levels shown here on this chart. You can see after 
World War II we actually reached nearly 110 percent of GDP. Our debt 
was nearly 110 percent of GDP. But, as you can see, it has gone down, 
and now it is trending way high.
  There is a big difference between this historical debt and the debt 
that we are experiencing now, because the question is: Who did we owe 
it to? After World War II, we owed 95 percent of the debt to ourselves. 
The U.S. public held 95 percent of the United States debt in 1945. 
Today, in 2009, only 54 percent is held by the U.S. public. China is 
holding 11 percent, and other foreign countries are holding 35 percent. 
So nearly 50 percent of our debt is owed to other countries. It is 
quite different than the scenario after World War II.
  It is a shame, Madam Speaker, that we didn't adopt the more 
significant budget cuts of the Republican Study Committee budgets. Had 
we done that over the last 5 years, we would now be looking at $613 
billion less in spending. We would have saved $613 billion by enacting 
those most conservative budgets offered on this House floor.
  If this keeps up, what we have got now is government spending now as 
a percentage of GDP, as you can see here under the Obama approach, 
fiscal year 2010 budget, with the out years being reflected in the 
long-term fiscal scenario of CBO, you can see that government spending 
as a percentage of GDP actually rises to nearly 50 percent, 50 percent 
of GDP being government spending. Under the Republican alternatives, 
you can see that we trend down after this most recent uptick, and we 
get down to the level of somewhere around 18 percent of GDP as a 
percentage of government spending.
  Madam Speaker, I am here to say to my colleagues that we must do 
something. These are scary numbers, and we have got to act.
  The key is to get to fiscal restraint and economic growth. Those 
things have to happen simultaneously. You do that by keeping taxes low, 
keeping regulation light, and getting litigation down. You do that by 
making wise energy policy that makes it so that energy can be the new 
tech boom that leads us out of the current recession.
  I happen to believe that the road to recovery and the road to energy 
independence are one and the same. If we get on that road, we can lead 
our way out of this recession.
  I happen to believe, too, that the upstate of South Carolina has a 
lot to offer in paving that road, making it so we can get to balanced 
budgets by economic growth and fiscal restraint, and improve the 
national security of the United States by breaking this addiction to 
oil, by finding these new sources of energy and making it so we can 
create jobs.

[[Page H11771]]

  Madam Speaker, that is what we should be about here. I hope we can 
get to it.

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