[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 5]
[House]
[Page 6519]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                  NEW DEMOCRATS FOR FISCAL DISCIPLINE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Etheridge) is recognized for 5 
minutes.
  Mr. ETHERIDGE. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to express my opposition to 
the Republican budget that the House passed this afternoon.
  As a member of the New Democratic Coalition when I came to Congress, 
I was very proud of the vote that I made last year in the last session 
to help lead my party in this Congress back to fiscal responsibility 
and be able to vote on the first balanced budget in a generation.
  I say that with a heavy heart today because I think we have just 
passed one, the majority has, that is not a budget but a political 
document.
  Prior to my service in public office, Mr. Speaker, I spent 19 years 
running a small business in North Carolina, where you have to balance 
the budget, you have to meet a payroll every week, and if you do not 
balance your books, you will go broke.
  When I served in the General Assembly where I served for 10 years, I 
chaired the appropriations committee for 4 years where I helped write a 
balanced budget for 4 straight years. You have to balance the budget to 
make sure you do not have to raise taxes.
  As State Superintendent of Schools of the State of North Carolina for 
8 years I had responsibility for running a large agency with a huge 
budget; I cut a bureaucracy, and it helped improve the quality of 
education, with others in my State.
  The people of North Carolina sent me to Congress 2 years ago to help 
with balancing the Federal budget and to put our national financial 
house in order, and I was tremendously proud to serve in that first 
session and vote to balance the budget. But that discipline is 
difficult. It is difficult to keep your budgets balanced. It is 
difficult to do the things you need to do to make sure you do not 
overspend. But it is economically wise, and it is a moral imperative.
  Mr. Speaker, that is why the Republican resolution that passed today 
is so disappointing. It returns to those irresponsible promises, in my 
opinion, and the tax cut binges that helped create the annual deficits, 
and it crippled this country's economy and piled up a huge national 
debt in the 1980s that our children and grandchildren could be forced 
to pay.
  In order to push this risky scheme, the Republican leadership has 
passed a budget that fails to protect Social Security and Medicare, 
threatens needed investments with our priorities in education and 
abandons our new-found fiscal discipline. This misguided attitude 
captured on this floor by Members of the majority who said there is 
nothing, there is no such thing, as an irresponsible tax cut, that is 
the kind of attitude we ran into in the 1980's that got us in such bad 
trouble. We should not return to those attitudes.
  Let me state for the record that I support tax cuts, I am in favor of 
them, but I think we ought to keep our financial house in order.
  One of the first bills that I signed as a Member of this Congress 
when I came was the tax cut for the middle class, for estate tax relief 
for small businesses and farmers, for the $500-per-child tax credit, 
for HOPE scholarships so that our children could go to school and have 
an opportunity to blossom in the 21st century, and to help families pay 
their college tuitions, and for tax credits or to deduct interest on 
the money they borrowed to go to college.
  In this Congress I have introduced legislation for school 
construction, to provide tax free interest bonds at the State level to 
build new schools in our communities, which in turn would provide 
relief to a lot of our local communities that are feeling the strain of 
tremendous growth.
  So I am for tax cuts, but they must be responsible, they must be paid 
for. We must save Social Security and Medicare first before we jump off 
the cliff. We must pay down the national debt to keep the interest rate 
down and encourage economic growth.
  We are now enjoying one of the largest, longest and greatest periods 
of economic prosperity in our Nation's history, and we should not do 
anything to undermine it. We must make careful investments in education 
and in health care and scientific research that will provide the basis 
for the future for our tremendous growth. We have had that already. We 
need to continue so that we will enjoy the bounty of a new economy in 
the 21st century.

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