[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 12]
[House]
[Pages 17790-17791]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                             ON THE BUDGET

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Simpson). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Smith) is recognized for 5 
minutes.
  Mr. SMITH of Michigan. Mr. Speaker, I want to also talk about where 
we go on the budget and also where we have been on this budget.
  Mr. Speaker, the Republicans were elected as a majority back in 1995. 
For almost every year before that, for the previous 40 years, the 
Democrat majority in this House used every cent of the Social Security 
surplus and spent it on other government programs. When Republicans 
came in, in 1995, we came in

[[Page 17791]]

with the enthusiasm to try to make government more efficient. We said, 
look, there has to be a balanced budget, and so we started cutting back 
on spending.
  We actually had a rescission bill. We started our session in January 
of 1995; but already, because we operate on a fiscal year, we had gone 
through the first one quarter of the budget year. But, still, with 
three-quarters left, we decided to cut down on the spending authorized 
for the rest of that year. We were successful, and we held the line on 
increased spending.
  The following year, with a great deal of effort and dedication, but 
also controversy, we did the same thing, because we were dedicated to 
the proposition that we should have a balanced budget and that Congress 
should live under the same logical, practical rules that every family 
has to live under, and that is that we had to try to pay down our debt 
and try to live within our means.
  We took a great deal of criticism that year and through the next 
election and were charged with accusations such as ``Republicans are 
taking food out of the mouths of children,'' and ``they are radical,'' 
and ``they are taking the security out of Social Security,'' and ``they 
are reducing spending at the sacrifice of America and the sacrifice of 
our economy.'' Of course, that did not happen, and we were successful 
in reaching a balanced budget.
  Now, I think everybody agrees, the President included, that a 
balanced budget is reasonable. The question and the challenge is do we 
continue down the road we have had for so many years, the last 45 
years, of moving for a bigger, more expensive, more intrusive Federal 
Government, really on the road to socialism; or do we set some 
priorities and do we say what is reasonable for taxpayers to pay in 
terms of the money they earn?
  Right now the average taxpayer in the United States pays about 40 
cents out of every dollar they earn in taxes to local, State and 
Federal Government. If we include the regulations that we impose on 
business, then it gets up to about 50 cents. So the first question is, 
how big should government be in terms of what earnings and income is? I 
say it is at its largest. Our taxes today are larger than they have 
ever been in the history of this country except for World War II.
  Now, should we pay down the debt or reduce taxes with some of the 
surpluses that are projected? In the budget we passed this year, we 
took what many of us have been preaching for the last several years, 
and that is to say that we were not going to use any of the Social 
Security surplus for any other government spending, and we came up with 
this idea of a lockbox.
  The lockbox is simply using every penny of the surplus coming into 
Social Security and using that money to pay down the debt held by the 
public. So it does not solve the Social Security problem, but at least 
it does not spend it for other government programs.
  Now, the challenge is, as we look at approximately a trillion dollars 
coming in over the next 10 years in income taxes, and another 
definition for surpluses in income taxes is somebody that is being 
overtaxed, how much of that money should go towards paying down the 
debt; how much of that money should be used for expanded government 
spending; and how much of that money should go into tax relief, or 
giving back to the American people? Or a better way to say that is let 
the American people keep a few more dollars of what they have earned.
  This tax reduction bill we passed the other day does both; it is a 
demand on paying down the debt as well as a tax cut for every American.
  We have defined our goal of reducing the debt in terms of how much 
the debt service costs in this country. Alan Greenspan told our 
Committee on the Budget that a good way to measure the imposition of 
how big the debt is in this country is to measure the debt service 
cost. That is how much interest we pay out. That is $360 billion a 
year. We need to bring that down. That interest rate is now tied to 
whether or not we have across-the-board tax reductions. So we set back 
the across-the-board tax reduction for any year that we do not reduce 
the interest cost.
  So I think it is correct, and I hope most of us agree, that we save 
Social Security and Medicare, but we also work at paying down the debt 
and we let the American people keep a few more dollars of what they 
have earned. They already work 4 months and 11 days during the year for 
taxes. That is enough.

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