[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 37 (Wednesday, March 5, 2014)]
[House]
[Page H2153]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           POLICIES THAT WORK

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. McClintock) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, as we begin the annual budget process, 
we need to stop thinking in terms of Democratic and Republican policies 
and start thinking in terms of what policies have worked and what 
policies have not. The successes and failures of both parties could 
teach us much.
  We are now in the sixth year of policies that promise to restore 
prosperity to America by radically increasing government spending and 
government intervention in our economy. These 6 years have not been 
happy ones for our Nation.
  When people say this is the worst economy since the depression, I 
remember a time much more recently when we suffered double-digit 
unemployment, double-digit inflation, mile-long lines around gas 
stations, and the prime interest rate at 20.5 percent. Perhaps we don't 
remember these times as vividly because they didn't last very long.
  That was the end of the Carter administration. We elected Ronald 
Reagan who declared that: ``Government is not the solution to our 
problem; government is the problem.''
  He reduced the tax and regulatory burdens that were crushing the 
economy and produced one of the most prosperous periods in our Nation's 
history. In doing so, he was following the precedent of successful 
presidencies from both parties, including Calvin Coolidge in the 1920s, 
Harry S. Truman in the mid-1940s, and John F. Kennedy in the early 
1960s.
  Lest we forget, in 1995, President Bill Clinton proclaimed: ``The era 
of big government is over.'' He dramatically reduced Federal spending 
as a percentage of GDP.
  He signed what amounted to the biggest capital gains tax cut in 
American history. He reduced entitlement spending by reforming the 
open-ended welfare system. He produced 4 years of budget surpluses, and 
the economy blossomed.
  George W. Bush pursued the opposite policies with the opposite 
results. He dramatically increased Federal spending as a percentage of 
GDP. He pushed through the biggest expansion of entitlement spending 
since the Great Society. He began the folly of stimulus spending. He 
turned in massive budget deficits, and the economy tanked.
  The problem with Barack Obama is not that he changed Bush's policies, 
but, rather, that he did not change them. He took the worst of them and 
doubled down.
  He has added $6.8 trillion to the national debt, meaning that today's 
young people will have to pay back $56,000, plus interest, per 
household through their future taxes for nothing more than to pay for 
this administration's overspending.
  He seized one-sixth of the American economy that provides our health 
care and is well on the way to wrecking it for millions of American 
families, costing them their health plans, their doctors, their 
savings, and their security. He has increased annual taxes by $551 
billion. That averages about $4,600 for every household in America.
  He made a lot of promises that turned out not to be true. He promised 
that massive government spending would produce prosperity. Instead, 
average personal incomes declined $2,600 during his presidency, and 
food stamp dependency is at an all-time high.
  Nearly one in six Americans is now living in poverty, including 22 
percent of all children. The workforce has shrunk to a smaller 
proportion of the population, as it was during the disastrous Carter 
years.
  He promised a government takeover of our health care would reduce our 
health costs and increase coverage for Americans. It has done exactly 
the opposite. Millions more American families have lost their health 
plans and their doctors than have gained them, and the overwhelming 
majority has suffered ruinous increases in their health care costs.
  The result is a declining standard of living at home, a declining 
respect for America abroad, and a generation in danger of becoming the 
first in our history to be less well off than their parents.
  Mr. Speaker, our own experience should now tell us that these 
policies don't work. They didn't work under George W. Bush, and they 
certainly haven't worked under Barack Obama. We know what does work, 
reducing the financial and regulatory burdens that government has 
placed on the economy, as both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton proved.
  It is time that we abandon these policies of debt, doubt, and 
despair. It is time we recognize that this government has grown too big 
and too powerful at the expense of hardworking taxpayers. It is time we 
restored those uniquely American principles of individual liberty, 
constitutionally limited government, and personal responsibility that 
have always been the foundation of our Nation's freedom, its 
prosperity, and its happiness.

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