[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 146 (2000), Part 16]
[House]
[Page 23329]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]


[[Page 23329]]

          END-OF-THE-YEAR SPENDING ORGY IN CONGRESS RIGHT NOW

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Duncan) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, we seem to have an end-of-the-year spending 
orgy going on in Congress right now. David Broder mentions in his 
column in The Washington Post today that spending for fiscal year 2001 
will be $100 billion more than allowed under the last major budget 
deal, according to the ``Congressional Quarterly.''
  Apparently most of the congressional leadership feels that we have to 
give into the excessive spending demanded by the President, because the 
alternative is to shut down the government. Unfortunately, there simply 
are not enough fiscal conservatives to override presidential vetoes. 
However, we are spending away a surplus that we do not yet have.
  We are jeopardizing the economy and our children's future in the 
process. We now have a foreign trade deficit of almost a billion 
dollars a day. This means we are buying roughly $350 billion a year 
from other countries more than we are selling to them. This is 
primarily because we have entered into bad trade deals, deals good for 
some big multinational companies, but very bad for small American 
businesses and American workers.
  Most economists agree that we lose roughly 20,000 jobs per billion, 
and no country can sustain a $350 billion-a-year trade deficit for very 
long. Do we ever wonder why so many young people are working as waiters 
or waitresses or why so many young people are going to graduate school 
because the good jobs are not there for even college graduates like 
they used to be?
  Along with this foreign trade deficit is all the spending our 
government does in and for other countries. The liberals found out many 
years ago that foreign aid was very unpopular, so they just started 
spending foreign aid money through numerous other foreign programs.
  They will very misleadingly say that our foreign aid money is less 
than 1 percent of our Federal budget. What they do not say is that we 
spend in addition to regular foreign aid, many billions more through 
the military, the Agriculture and Commerce Departments, the State 
Department, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the 
World Bank and on and on and on.
  This administration has deployed our troops around the world more 
times than the six previous administrations put together, mostly just 
turning our military in international social workers. Billions and 
billions and billions in Haiti, Rwanda, Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo. 
Right now we are spending $2 billion a year on what the Associated 
Press has described as a forgotten war against Iraq.

                              {time}  1915

  Most of our people do not even realize we are still bombing there 
against a nation now so weak that it is absolutely no threat to us at 
all unless our continued bombing forces them into some type of 
desperate terrorist actions.
  Many large companies benefit greatly from these trade deals and from 
our sending billions to other countries in military or non-military 
missions. They and their allies in the national media and elsewhere 
have made it politically incorrect to oppose these trade deals or 
oppose sending mega billions overseas.
  Those who do oppose all this foreign spending or these trade deals 
that benefit big international corporations are very falsely accused of 
being isolationists. However, if Members hear anyone make this charge, 
they should realize immediately that this name-calling simply means 
that the person calling someone an isolationist is trying to avoid an 
argument on the merits.
  This Nation should be friends with every nation. We should have all 
sorts of foreign exchange programs and diplomatic relations, and send 
our experts in every field when requested, and lead international 
fundraising in times of human catastrophe. But this does not mean that 
we should keep sending billions and billions overseas, or continually 
bombing people who have not threatened us, or be the world's policeman 
through our military.
  President Kennedy said in 1961 that with just 6 percent of the 
world's population, we must realize that we are neither omnipotent nor 
omniscient, and that there is not an American solution to every world 
problem. Now we are less than 4 percent of the world's population.
  George Washington warned against entangling alliances with foreign 
countries, and Dwight Eisenhower warned against a military-industrial 
complex that would commit us all over the world simply so that it and 
its companies could get more money.
  Professor John Moser, writing in the Autumn 1999 issue of Ohio 
History, noted that Senator Robert Taft was often falsely called an 
isolationist when he was really a conservative nationalist. Moser 
writes of Taft: ``. . .he was remarkably prescient on many of the 
problems inherent in a highly interventionist foreign policy: 
unprecedented accumulation of power in the hands of the executive 
branch of the government, curtailment of civil liberties at home, the 
charge of `imperialism' arising from American influence abroad, and 
most importantly, the danger of what Paul Kennedy referred to as 
`imperial overreach,' the extension of overseas commitments beyond the 
ability of a nation to meet them.''
  Senator Taft once said, ``Nothing can destroy this country except the 
overextension of our resources.'' We should heed these words today.

                          ____________________