[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 146 (2000), Part 2]
[House]
[Page 2804]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



AMERICANS MANAGE TO BALANCE THEIR CHECKBOOKS EACH MONTH, AND WE SHOULD 
                              DO THE SAME

  (Mr. GREEN of Texas asked and was given permission to address the 
House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. GREEN of Texas. Mr. Speaker, I would like to associate my remarks 
with the remarks of my colleague from Galveston County today with the 
death of Walter Hall. One, he is a great American but also a great 
Texan.
  Let me say what I am really here for is that here we go again. It 
seems like Yogi Berra said, deja vu all over again. We are counting our 
surplus eggs before they have hatched. Like kids who have taken their 
parents' credit cards and are on a buying spree, my Republican 
colleagues are busy spending a budget surplus that does not exist yet. 
It is just a wish and a prayer.
  Instead of paying down the $5.5 trillion national debt and securing 
the future of Social Security and Medicare, they want another tax cut. 
It is strange, for the first time this last 10 days we are actually 
having the Department of Treasury paying off part of our national debt, 
first time in recent history; but their efforts would stop this. We 
should be using the surplus to ensure that Social Security and Medicare 
will rest on a financially sound foundation well into the next century. 
My Republican friends, though, are proposing billions in tax cuts that 
would take this away. We need to do better. The American people need to 
do better. We need to do better.

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