[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 126 (Thursday, July 25, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5095-S5097]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              DEBT CEILING

  Mr. LEE. Mr. President, there is a quote that has long been 
attributed to St. Augustine, who, during his conversion to 
Christianity, famously uttered a prayer: Lord, help me be chaste. Grant 
me chastity, but not yet.
  The idea behind this is as old as human nature itself, which is that 
it is easier to have a thought of doing something later than to do that 
thing now, especially when it is a difficult task.

[[Page S5096]]

  It is one of the reasons New Year's resolutions often result in a 
spike, an abrupt increase in gym enrollments and memberships. People 
develop New Year's resolutions; they decide they are going to lose 
weight; they are going to exercise more; they are going to eat less. 
Then it becomes more difficult as time goes by, and perhaps over time, 
some of them might find it easier to say: Well, I will lose weight 
later in the year.
  After starting the new year off to a good start, they might say: 
Well, I will lose more weight in the last half of the year. Later in 
the year it might occur to them that they will lose more weight in the 
last 2 months of the year. Regardless, as they continue to delay that 
moment, the task doesn't get easier; it often gets harder.
  The budget and spending and debt limit deal that was announced 
earlier this week reminds me a little bit of this aspect of human 
nature. It is understandable why this happens. It is especially 
understandable why it happens in a place where people are elected and 
where people want to be liked, where supporting greater government 
spending often results in praise, and calling for even a mild tapping 
on the brakes often results in rather severe criticism in the press, 
even by one's own constituents. But that doesn't mean that we can 
pretend things are different than they really are.
  So, yes, you can suspend the debt ceiling, and you can waive budget 
rules, but you can't suspend or waive or ignore the laws of 
mathematics.
  We have to remember that at a time when we are talking about a 
significant expansion of the role of the Federal Government, when we 
are talking about suspending the debt ceiling for an additional 2 
years, we are talking about paving the way for us to spend a whole lot 
more money through the Federal Government than we would otherwise 
spend.
  This is occurring at a time when Americans are already required to 
work many weeks and, in some cases, many months out of every year just 
to pay their Federal taxes. In addition to this, after that they are 
told: By the way, that is not enough.
  It is not nearly enough because, for a long time, the Federal 
Government has been spending a lot more money than it takes in. Lately, 
it has been to the tune of many hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
  We have never in our history brought in more money or as much money 
into the Federal Government's coffers as we are bringing in right now. 
We are at the very top of the business cycle. We have nearly record-low 
unemployment, in the range of roughly 4 percent or a little below, 
which is, we are told by economists, basically full employment in 
America. At a time when all of these things seem to be going our way 
and we are enjoying a period of relative peace in the world and in our 
country, we have record-breaking deficits, and this budget and debt 
ceiling deal would expand the path, would pave the path for even more 
of that.
  That begs the question: If we can't control spending now, when the 
economy is performing about as well as it possibly can, then when can 
we?
  To borrow a phrase from John F. Kennedy, ``If not us, who? If not 
now, when?''
  Let's talk for a minute about America's history with expanding its 
debt limit, expanding its debt footprint.
  What we see through this chart that I have to my right is that during 
a number of periods of crisis in American history, we have accumulated 
more debt--that is, a more-than-average amount of debt--as a percentage 
of our gross domestic product.
  We see various peaks, most of them following and brought about as a 
result of a major war and, in some cases, some other type of crisis.
  We have the Revolutionary War. The Revolutionary War was fought and, 
mercifully, won, and our debt as a percentage of GDP went down.
  It peaked a little bit a few years later when we had to fight the War 
of 1812. We won that war, too, and then debt as a percentage of our GDP 
went down. It remained low for many decades.
  When we fought the Civil War, it peaked again. It went back to close 
to 40 percent of our gross domestic product. The Civil War ended, and 
it went back down.
  It peaked again at World War I and then went back down. It peaked to 
a very significant degree at World War II and then promptly went back 
down.
  See, through this period of time following World War II--the late 
forties into the fifties--we had a whole lot of revenue coming in. We 
weren't accumulating new debt, and we were paying off our debt at the 
same time that our economy was expanding.

  Consequently, even though every year didn't result in a balanced 
budget, our debt held by the public as a Federal Government went down 
as a percentage of our gross domestic product.
  But in each of these instances that I described, there was a reason; 
there was a distinct, unmistakable, finite reason why these things 
happened. Once those reasons went away, once we had won the wars in 
question, our debt as a percentage of our gross domestic product--that 
is, the volume of economic activity in America--went back down.
  We saw a couple of other peaks. We had the Gulf war and a recession 
in roughly the same period. It resulted in an increase of debt as a 
percentage of GDP. That war ended, and that recession went away, and it 
went back down.
  Something interesting has been happening. In the last few years, as 
we came out of the great recession, as we have enjoyed a very 
significant, historic recovery in our economy, the economy has been 
expanding, and jobs abound. The economy in which we now live has more 
people employed in basically every demographic than we would have 
considered likely a few years ago. Yet, notwithstanding that fact, our 
debt as a percentage of our gross domestic product continues to go up.
  This graph in some ways even understates the matter relative to where 
we were at World War II. We hit the peak during World War II at, I 
believe, 106, 107 percent of gross domestic product. We are not quite 
at that level yet today by standard metrics, but if you include in this 
figure not only the debt held by the public--that is, the debt held by 
those who purchase U.S. security bonds and U.S. Treasury instruments 
generally--if you add to that the so-called intragovernmental debt, the 
IOUs the Federal Government has written to Social Security and Medicare 
to try to make up for funds that Congress wants access to but doesn't 
have, we are actually well over 100 percent in terms of our debt-to-GDP 
ratio. In other words, we are about where we were at the peak of the 
crisis we were addressing during World War II.
  That begs the questions: When does this end? How does this end?
  There is not a world war in which we are involved right now. We are 
experiencing relative peace. There is not a recession. We are in the 
middle of one of the greatest peacetime economic recoveries this land 
has ever seen.
  So if not us, then who? And if not now, then when?
  Why is it that we now have to suspend our debt ceiling in order to 
essentially transfer to younger Americans, to subsequent generations 
the responsibility of financing the government that we have today?
  One can easily defend those things when talking about the survival of 
a nation or about a world war or about a war in which our Nation's 
survival is at stake. We are not involved in any such effort right now.
  We are involved in some conflicts around the world, but those are not 
really what is driving this. What is driving this is that we have a 
government that is too big and too expensive.
  This means a lot of things to a lot of people. It is something that 
should weigh on every American seriously. I believe it weighs 
especially heavily on younger Americans, not just younger Americans 
themselves, but people who have children and grandchildren.
  I represent a State with the lowest median age in the entire country, 
the State of Utah. We are also the State with the largest percentage of 
people under the age of 18.
  I would like to speak to some of those people right now--those people 
under the age of 18, especially in my State where they are 
disproportionately represented.
  Young Americans, those who have not yet attained the age of 18, have 
had all this debt accumulate--some $22 trillion now by the Federal 
Government--that they are going to be responsible for, notwithstanding 
the fact that all

[[Page S5097]]

of that debt has been accumulated at periods in their life either 
before they were born or before they were old enough to vote.
  It amounts to, in a sense, a really pernicious form of taxation 
without representation. We fought a war over that principle, and we won 
that war.
  We shouldn't be doing this defiantly without a plan for turning it 
around, without a reason to have to do that--a reason that has to do 
with our very survival--without some sort of plan for getting out of 
it. But instead of getting out it, we are accelerating into it, and 
that is troubling.
  Some might argue, and, in fact, some within this body and in the 
House of Representatives have argued that so-called discretionary 
spending is not worth worrying about. Discretionary spending, for those 
of you not familiar with the term, refers to that part of the 
government that Congress decides on each and every year that isn't 
predecided the way our entitlement programs are.
  In other words, mandatory or entitlement spending, spending on things 
like Social Security and Medicare that are already set aside--those are 
things we don't have discretion over. They are already called for by 
law. We already have to spend money on them.
  There are those in Congress who will maintain that we shouldn't worry 
about discretionary spending, which is the primary focus of this 
measure, of this budget caps deal, and of this debt ceiling deal, 
because, really, the bigger picture, the bigger concern, and the bigger 
threat is, in fact, about mandatory spending. It is the entitlement 
programs, they will say, that really are driving the looming debt 
crisis. But it is important to point out that we are not reforming 
those either. We couldn't even stick to the budget caps that both 
parties in both Houses and the White House agreed to just a few years 
ago.
  It defies logic and reason, in my mind, for people to say: Well, we 
shouldn't worry about discretionary spending because mandatory spending 
is really where the problem is. No one would ever advise someone 
struggling with alcohol consumption that they shouldn't worry about 
consuming too much alcohol if they are also addicted to something 
else--meth or heroin or some other terribly addictive substance that 
might also be harmful to them. The fact that you are dealing with one 
problem doesn't mean that you don't also have to face the other 
problem. That is the concern I have with this deal. That is the reason 
I plan to vote against it.
  I know and I will be the first to admit that there are no easy 
solutions here. There are no solutions that anyone would look to and 
say: Yes, that sounds like a lot of fun. I don't want to do that.
  It reminds me of a time when my sister, Stephanie, was enrolled in a 
new school shortly after my family moved back to Utah. Stephanie was in 
kindergarten. Stephanie was asked by the teacher, as they were testing 
her to try to figure out which class she should be in, to take out her 
favorite color of crayon and write down her name. My mom watched from a 
distance as the teacher administered this test. She knew that Stephanie 
knew full well how to write her name. She watched in a certain degree 
of agony as Stephanie sat there and didn't pick up a single crayon.
  After the test was complete and the teacher concluded, mistakenly, 
that Stephanie didn't know how to write her name, my mom asked her: Why 
didn't you write your name?
  She said: The lady asked me to pick out my favorite color of crayon, 
and they didn't have pink. So I didn't write my name.
  Sometimes I wonder whether Congress is in the same position as my 
sister Stephanie when she was at that young age being tested. We don't 
see our favorite color of crayon. We don't see our favorite option. We 
don't see any easy options there.
  In fact, we see a whole lot of options that would involve putting a 
dent in this problem--this growing, building problem that I have 
pointed out in the graph--and we see criticism that would likely ensue 
from any one of those options. Now, I understand that. It doesn't mean 
that the laws of mathematics will not eventually catch up to us.
  Winston Churchill is known to have said of the American people that 
the American people will always make the right choice after they have 
exhausted every other alternative. Now, I don't know whether he, in 
fact, said that. If he did, in fact, say it, I don't think he meant it 
as a compliment to the American people, but I take it as such. It is a 
compliment. It is what differentiates us from other countries. We do, 
in fact, make the right choice. We are great not because of who we are 
but because of what we do, and, generally, at least after we have 
exhausted other alternatives, we do make the right choice--a choice 
that reflects the principles of liberty that really have always defined 
us as a nation.
  Those principles cannot coexist with an effort that suggests to us 
that our government is so big and has to be so big that there is 
nothing we can do about the fact that Americans are required to work 
weeks or months out of every year just to pay their Federal taxes and 
then be told that we are $22 trillion in debt. By the time the 2 years 
contemplated under this deal have passed, we may well be at $23 
trillion, $24 trillion, or, perhaps, approaching $25 trillion in debt. 
Is it going to be any easier then to deal with the problem than it is 
now? I think not.
  If not us, who? If not now, when? The way we start making steps in 
the right direction is to vote against a bill--a bill that, like this 
one, does not meaningfully address the problem.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Lee). The Senator from Indiana.

                          ____________________