[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 148 (2002), Part 12]
[House]
[Pages 16913-16914]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          BALANCING THE BUDGET

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Texas (Mr. Stenholm) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. STENHOLM. Mr. Speaker, I want to continue on the general thesis 
of the concern that many of us have on this side of the aisle, that we 
seemingly have forgotten about budgets and balanced budgets and we seem 
to not be willing to talk about the deficits that are now occurring. 
That is very alarming.
  As you know, last year this body passed a budget, an economic game 
plan. There seems to be a great reluctance to change that plan, which

[[Page 16914]]

means that we are now willingly going to be endorsing deficits as far 
as the eye can see.
  We on this side on the Blue Dog Caucus have repeatedly offered to 
work in a bipartisan way with our friends on the other side of the 
aisle and with the administration to come up with a new budget plan. 
But there seems to be no desire whatsoever to do so.
  We now are very concerned, because at the end of this month the few 
remaining budget rules that have worked fairly good over the most 
recent period of time when we did achieve a balanced budget, pay-go, 
simply saying if you are going to increase spending you have got to 
find some cut somewhere else, expire. If you are going to cut taxes, 
you have got to find somewhere else to pay for it. It has worked pretty 
good, when the spirit of this body was behind it.
  Now, Mr. Speaker, there seems to be no willingness of the leadership 
of this House to pass these budget enforcement rules so that they might 
at least be enforced, and some would say so they can be ignored, which 
is basically what we have been doing in this body all year. The rules 
we have, we ignore them and we pass a rule over the objection of the 
minority.
  The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget makes a very 
compelling argument that we should stop blaming the other body for what 
they are not doing and just us do our job. It would seem that it would 
make a lot more sense to all of us in this body if we passed all 13 
appropriation bills. Then we would have something to be concerned 
about, whether the Senate does or does not pass a budget.

                              {time}  1930

  But we seemingly are not going to be able to pass the 13 
appropriation bills, but some of us seem perfectly willing to find 
somebody to blame. I was reminded a long time ago when you are pointing 
the finger of blame at someone else, there are always three pointing 
back at you; and we need to be reminded and we are going to take to the 
floor quite often over the next several days and remind everyone of the 
multitude of budget votes, lockbox votes that we voted in this body 
almost unanimously that no one was going to touch the Social Security 
surplus. We are. And as far as the eye can see, we are going to be 
doing it again.
  Running up debt, we increased our Nation's debt by $450 billion in a 
vote last year. We are going to have to do it again early next year 
because, as the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Taylor) pointed out, 
our public debt outstanding has now gone to $6.210 trillion. That is an 
increase of $440 billion, and I said increase because seemingly when 
you read the press and you read the rhetoric of what we are attempting 
to be told that it is not that bad, it is that bad. It is a serious 
problem, and it goes far beyond the war on terrorism.
  CBO says the impact of September 11 represents only about 11 percent 
of the total deterioration of the surplus since last year, and now we 
are being told that we are going to possibly be in another war, that 
the estimated cost now ranges somewhere between 100 and $200 billion. 
We should spend some time, instead of doing what we seem to be doing 
here this week, very few votes of substance, very few discussions, no 
bills being proposed to put the pay-go rules and putting some budget 
discipline back into our budget, no one talking about a budget, no one 
talking about a new budget, which means that somebody ought to come on 
this floor and defend the budget that we are now under.
  Come on this floor and honestly talk about the fact that we have 
borrowed in the last 12 months $440 billion; $440 billion that we have 
borrowed. We owe the Social Security trust fund $1.3 trillion. We owe 
Medicare $263 billion. We owe the military retirement fund $164 
billion. We owe the civil service retirement and disability fund $535 
billion, and we are increasing that. I do not think that is the kind of 
a budget confidence vote that the markets are looking at or that anyone 
is looking at today.
  I would conclude my remarks by saying Congress and the President need 
to come up with a new budget and economic game plan to deal with the 
changes in our budgetary outlook and deal with the new circumstances 
facing this country. To do otherwise is fiscally irresponsible.

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