[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 148 (2002), Part 10]
[House]
[Pages 13372-13373]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            LEGACIES OF DEBT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Taylor) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. TAYLOR of Mississippi. Mr. Speaker, about a week ago the 
President of the United States went to Wall Street in the wake of the 
accounting scandals and the scandals that have caused so many Americans 
to lose so much money, so much of their life savings, so much money 
that they were counting on to pay for their retirements. One of the 
things he told the Wall Street firms was, you have to change the system 
of hiding your debts, making your balance sheets look better than they 
are. It is a shame the President did not live by his own axiom a year 
ago right now.
  Those of my colleagues who watch television, those of my colleagues 
who read the newspapers know that starting last January, February, 
March, we are talking about a year ago, the President was telling the 
American people, Washington is awash in money, it is awash in money. We 
have to have this big tax break. Well, it is easy to pay, Mr. 
President, if you are hiding the debts of the country. You see, because 
a year ago right now, and I do mean a year ago right now, our Nation 
was $5,726,814,835,287.17 in debt, and yet you had the American people 
convinced that we were awash in money.
  What is even worse than the fact that we owed all of that money was 
that we owed; and I look into the audience and I look around the 
country and I see folks who pay taxes and the biggest portion of a lot 
of folks' taxes is what they pay to Social Security, that is that FICA 
on your tax bill. The promise was made in the 1980s when they raised 
those taxes, with a Democratic House and a Republican Senate and a 
Republican President by the name of President Reagan, they were going 
to take that money and set it aside and make sure it is used for 
nothing but Social Security. They lied to us.
  Mr. Speaker, right now, if we were to find the mythical lock box for 
Social Security and open it up, all we will find is an IOU that says we 
owe the people who paid into the Social Security Trust Fund 
$1,300,000,000,000. If we look a little bit farther down on our pay 
stub, and again, these taxes were raised in the 1980s, a Democratic 
House, a Republican Senate and a Republican President, they raised the 
taxes on Medicare. If you were to find the mythical lock box for 
Medicare, and I do mean mythical, because there is nothing there, we 
would find an IOU for $271 billion.
  Now, for folks like myself from Mississippi, it is hard to imagine $1 
billion. I think one of the reasons that the folks in Washington use 
the term ``billion'' is we think of it as 271 of these things, be it 
apples or boats or whatever. So let me walk an average Joe like myself 
through it.
  Everybody can visualize $1,000. A lot of people pay $1,000 on their 
house on rent. So we can kind of visualize a thousand times a thousand. 
That gets us up to a million. Visualize a thousand times that. That is 
a billion. So a thousand times a thousand times a thousand times 271 is 
what we owe the Medicare trust fund. There is not a penny there. It is 
spent. The money collected was supposed to be set aside for Social 
Security, for Medicare. It is gone.
  How about our military retirees? How many times have we heard since 
September how proud we are of our troops and how we need to do 
everything for them? Well, Mr. President, maybe one of the things we 
ought to do for them is pay back the $168 billion that we owe to their 
retirement fund. Again, a thousand times a thousand times a thousand 
times 168. There is not a penny there, it is just IOUs.
  We have heard about our brave Border Patrol, the Customs agents, the 
FBI agents, the guys who sweep these buildings on a fairly regular 
basis looking for chemical and biological weapons. They pay into their 
retirement fund; this young lady right here pays into her retirement 
fund; her employer, you, the Federal Government pays a portion into her 
retirement fund. If we were to find the account for the retirement 
fund, all we are going to find is an IOU for a thousand times a 
thousand times a thousand times 540.

[[Page 13373]]

  Mr. President, it begs the question, how did you tell the American 
people we were awash in money when we were $5 trillion in debt? You had 
your budget. You had a Republican House, a Republican Senate, they 
passed you a budget dollar for dollar the way you wanted it. You got 
your tax cuts, and in the wake of all of that, in 12 months alone, we 
have increased the national debt, the debt that all of these young 
people in this room have to pay, the debt that my kids have to pay, by 
$399,653,925,113.31.
  Mr. Speaker, in the time that you have been Speaker of the House, the 
national debt has increased by $511,040,208,939. That is more money 
than this country accumulated in debt in 199 years, and yet, for 1,300 
days you have not allowed us a vote on a balanced budget amendment. Is 
this not enough? Is this the legacy you want to leave the American 
people, or do you want to leave the American people a legacy of a 
balanced budget? I hope, and I ask, for the latter.

                          ____________________