[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 2 (Thursday, January 6, 2011)]
[House]
[Page H52]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               THE HYPOCRISY OF THE ELIMINATION OF PAYGO

  (Mr. MORAN asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. MORAN. Horrible tragedies like that cited by the two previous 
speakers remind us that there are simply too many guns too readily 
available to too many children. It has got to stop.
  On a very different subject, though, Mr. Speaker, when Ronald Reagan 
ran for President, he said that any President who does not submit a 
balanced budget should be impeached. He never did balance a budget. In 
fact, the only times that our budget has been balanced was during the 
Clinton administration as a result of what is called PAYGO--that you 
don't increase spending without increasing a concomitant amount of 
revenue; and you don't cut taxes without immediately cutting the same 
amount of spending. That worked. We had three successive years of 
budget surpluses, and we passed on a $5.6 trillion projected surplus to 
the Bush administration.
  Yet, as soon as the new Republican Congress came in at the beginning 
of the 21st century, they eliminated PAYGO. Two wars, two deep tax cuts 
and a massive expansion of Medicare were never paid for. As a result, 
we had a $9 trillion fiscal reversal. When the Democrats came back in, 
we reinstated it; but yesterday the new Republican Congress exempted $5 
trillion from PAYGO--$4 trillion of unpaid-for tax cuts and $1.3 
trillion of savings we could have gotten from health care reform.
  It is the height of hypocrisy and deeply disappointing.

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