[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 10]
[House]
[Pages 13350-13351]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                 ADMINISTRATION WILL NOT TELL THE TRUTH

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, when you have been away from this House 
for a week, sometimes it is hard to tell what subject you ought to talk 
about first, because this administration is the gang that cannot shoot 
straight. They cannot tell anybody the truth about anything.
  Whether it is weapons of mass destruction, where we have heard every 
story in the whole world, yet everywhere you look people do not believe 
the President of the United States, they do not believe our Secretary 
of War or anybody else when they talk about those weapons of mass 
destruction. Or we could talk about Medicare, or we could talk about 
the tax bill.
  My colleague, the gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller), got 
up here and told the game that was run on the people in this House when 
they slammed the bill through here, this rubber stamp Congress. They 
did it in one 2-hour period. Bang, they passed out $350 billion, but 
could not find $3.5 billion to cover the kids of the working poor in 
this country. They could give money to millionaires, $93,000; but they 
could not give even $400 to the children of the working people of this 
country.
  Now, there is an overarching question here and that is this whole 
question of whether you can solve this country's problems by tax cuts. 
You know, it takes the British. You have to read the British newspapers 
to find out what is going on in this country. If you read the Financial 
Times of London, they tell us that our President hid something from us 
when we were passing this bill. He hid from us a report done by his 
Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. O'Neill. Remember him? He was the guy 
before the one we have now. The one now is Snow, so I guess we will get 
Snow jobs. But the guy before was O'Neill.
  Mr. O'Neill said to his staff, suppose the government could get its 
hands on all the revenue it could expect to collect in the future but 
had to use it today to pay off future expenditures, including debt 
service. Would the present value of the future revenues cover the 
present value of the future expenditures? Very simple question. He 
asked a guy from the Federal Reserve and his own assistant secretary to 
sit down and do this report. They did the report, and they came back 
with some pretty ugly facts. This thing was supposed to go into the 
budget to talk about what the future of this country was about, about 
those kids that cannot even get $400 this year. This was a report that 
was supposed to go in about the future.

[[Page 13351]]

  Their answer was, no, we cannot pay for it with the money that we 
need. We will be $44 trillion in debt; $44 trillion in debt because of 
what they are doing right now. Now, that is a number that, if you are 
sitting at home and you are thinking to yourself, my God, how much is 
$44 trillion, well, think of it this way: imagine that everyone in this 
country worked for 4 years, every single day went to work for 4 years, 
everybody in the country, and handed over every penny to cover this $44 
trillion deficit. That is what it would take. Every man, woman and 
child. Even those little kids that they could not find $400 for now.
  They are creating a problem out there that when their fathers and 
their mothers come to Medicare and come to Social Security, they will 
say, well, gee, we would like to help you out, but it is all gone. They 
are creating it right here in front of us. And it is bad enough, I 
mean, people voted, we did talk a little bit about it out here, people 
talked about it; but what is awful about this is that they knew these 
figures and they kept them from us.
  Just like the weapons of mass destruction. There is a kind of a 
pattern, you see, in this administration. Feed the people the facts you 
want them to know, keep snapping your fingers so they will look up 
here, and meanwhile take away from them down here. They did it with 
weapons of mass destruction. We were assured. Our President said he has 
them. Our Secretary of State said he has them. He went to the United 
Nations and put up charts and graphs and all kinds of pictures. We have 
them, he said. The Secretary of War, Mr. Rumsfeld, he said the same 
thing. One after another these guys went down the line telling us what 
they knew was not true.
  The Voice of America carried a very interesting interview with a man 
who came out of the Iraq situation. He was in the United States, and he 
said there were no weapons of mass destruction after 1991. This 
administration will not tell you the truth, but you are in for one 
awful problem dealing with $44 trillion all of a sudden.

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