[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 148 (2002), Part 4]
[House]
[Page 4946]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1030
      EXTENSION OF TAX CUT WILL RAID SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE

  (Mr. MORAN of Virginia asked and was given permission to address the 
House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. MORAN of Virginia. Mr. Speaker, it is important to review a 
little of the chronology leading to today's vote. Only last year, at 
the end of the Clinton administration, there was a $5.6 trillion 
surplus forecast.
  Now, the majority of Democrats said, let us be a little fiscally 
disciplined here. Let us wait and see if these numbers hold up. But the 
Republican majority, in a rush to judgment, went ahead and enacted a $2 
trillion tax cut. Here we are, the very next year, $4 trillion of the 
surplus is gone and we realize that that money is going to have to come 
out of Social Security and Medicare trust funds, even though five times 
we all voted for a lockbox on Social Security and Medicare.
  The lockbox is broken. Today we are going to cut taxes between the 
years 2011 to 2020 by another $4 trillion, $7 trillion when you count 
interest payments on the increased public debt it will create, and 
virtually all of that money is going to have to be paid for by Social 
Security and Medicare. Yet in that decade, from 2011 to 2020, we are 
going to see another 40 million people join the retirement rolls.
  This is fiscally irresponsible. It is not right. We would not do it 
in our own family, and we should not do it to the American family.

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