[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 2 (Tuesday, January 12, 2010)]
[House]
[Pages H15-H16]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        THE CLIMBING DEBT BURDEN

  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. You know, Mr. Speaker, I get a big kick out of 
my colleagues from the other side of the aisle who continue to beat on 
the Bush administration. I mean, we're not in the Bush administration. 
We are in the Obama administration. And the Obama administration this 
year has outlined a $3.55 trillion budget. They always seem to come 
down when they talk about President Bush and his administration, some 
of the shortcomings--and there has never been an administration that 
didn't have some shortcomings--but they don't talk much about what's 
happened since they took power.
  When the Democrats took over Congress less than 3 years ago, the 
national debt was under $9 trillion. It went from $9 trillion to $10 
trillion to $11 trillion to over $12 trillion. That's just in the last 
3 years. They're spending money like it's going out of style. They have 
increased the national debt limit five times in just the last 3 years, 
and the increase of $3.4 trillion is 38 percent-plus over what the 
national debt was when they took control of this Chamber and the other 
Chamber. It really bothers me when they talk about all this in 
retrospect and they don't pay any attention to what's going on now and 
what should be going on in the future.
  They're talking about a national health care plan now that is going 
to cost, I believe, $3 trillion over the next decade, and they're 
behind closed doors, trying to ram that thing through without really 
having even a conference committee. They're doing it with just the 
leaders, and they're doing it in a smoke-filled room with--well, maybe 
they don't smoke. But they are doing it in a closed room where nobody 
can see--not even C-SPAN, even though they promised that they would.
  Now let's just look at what's happened since they took power with the

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White House as well as the House and the Senate since January of 2009. 
They passed the state Children's Health Insurance Program 
Reorganization Act, which was $73.3 billion. Then in February, they 
passed the stimulus bill, which has not worked. Unemployment, which was 
not supposed to go over 8 percent, went over 10 percent. Now it's at 
least 10 percent. And that bill was $1.16 trillion when you include 
interest.
  Also in February, they passed the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 
which was $410 billion. When you add interest to it, it's $625 billion. 
Then in June of 2009, they passed the defense supplemental, which was 
not a bad deal because we had to do something about our military 
personnel in combat around the world, protecting our freedoms. But in 
addition to what we were doing for our military personnel and defense, 
they had all kinds--I think they had 3,000 or 4,000 pork barrel 
projects stuck in there. Then in December, they passed a consolidated 
appropriations bill for fiscal year 2010 which was $3.554 trillion.
  Now the President has said just in the last couple of days, we have 
to do something about spending. Man, that is really, really a great 
statement. I wish he'd thought about that about a year ago when he 
first took office. But nevertheless, it's better to be aware of it now 
than to not do anything about it at all. But he's talking about cutting 
spending by between 3 and 5 percent on discretionary spending, and 
that's going to amount to--oh, maybe $150 billion. But he's spending 
$3.55 trillion. So you're still going to have about $3.4 trillion, even 
if we were to cut spending by about 3 to 5 percent.
  The spending is completely out of control. The health care bill 
they're talking about is not going to start providing coverage, 
benefits until 2013, and yet the taxes start right now, which means 
simply that the $1 trillion they are talking about being the cost of 
that health care plan is not going to be $1 trillion; it's going to be 
at least $1.5 trillion. And if it's anything like other government 
programs that they have rammed through in the past, it will double 
that. And I really believe we are going to see a $3 trillion cost to 
the health care bill in this next decade if they pass it.
  I'm very hopeful that the Senate--some Senator, at least one or two--
will see the light and realize the American people simply don't want 
that. The overwhelming majority of Americans don't want anything coming 
between them and their doctor, especially government. They don't want 
socialized medicine, and they don't want all this spending. They want 
to do what Ronald Reagan did back in the early 1980s when he came in, 
and the situation was even worse then. We had 12 percent unemployment. 
We had 14 percent inflation, a misery index of 26 percent--that's what 
they called it.
  And Reagan came in, instead of raising taxes, as many of his advisers 
said he should do, he said, No, no, I'm going to cut taxes. I'm going 
to cut taxes across the board for individuals, for businesses, for 
corporations, for industry. Because if we give them more of their tax 
money back, they'll be able to spend more on investment. They'll be 
able to spend more to buy cars and refrigerators and everything else. 
And as a result, the economy turned around, and we had a 20-year 
expansion of the economy, which was unparalleled in my lifetime.
  Yet we haven't learned from John F. Kennedy, and we haven't learned 
from President Reagan. We're doing exactly the opposite. We're spending 
money like it's going out of style and coming up with new government 
programs which are going to cost jobs and dig us into a debt that we're 
never going to get out of. It's going to cause inflation and higher 
taxes. What we should be doing right now, as I have said on this floor 
many times, is we should go back to the Reagan and John F. Kennedy 
formula and cut taxes, give this economy a real shot in the arm by 
letting people keep more of their money, and you will see us create 
jobs. We won't have 10 percent unemployment in a year or two or three. 
It will be down. It will be going down. It will be going down fairly 
rapidly once this starts to take hold.
  But as long as we just keep spending and spending and spending and 
digging ourselves into a deeper hole by coming up with new programs 
like this crazy health care bill they're talking about, we're never 
going to solve our problem. And our kids and our grandkids and the 
posterity of this country are going to look back and say, Why did you 
do this to us? Why did you do this to us?

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