[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 12]
[House]
[Pages 15790-15791]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




         MAKING AMERICA FISCALLY SECURE FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to the order of the House of 
January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Smith) is recognized 
during morning hour debates for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SMITH of Michigan. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to talk about how 
much debt and how much of an increased tax there is going to be placed 
on my 10 grandchildren and everybody else's grandchildren and children. 
Let me just review what we have been doing on increased spending.
  Discretionary increases have averaged 6.3 percent each year since 
1996 and 7.7 percent each year since budget balance was reached in 
1998. By this chart, you can see the red line where we have taken off 
on increased spending, not just keeping up with inflation, but 6.3 
percent every year, which is two and three times the rate of inflation, 
and, in one year, four times the rate of inflation. How big can 
government get? How big do we want government to be?
  This week we are considering a prescription drug program. The next 
chart, Mr. Speaker, shows what is going to happen to the total debt of 
this country. The blue line is the gross Federal debt. The debt held by 
the public is the green line.
  Actually, we have two debts in this country. First, is the amount we 
borrow from Social Security. In 1983, we expanded the Social Security 
tax, increased the FICA tax, your payroll tax for Social Security, more 
than ever before in the history of the country and it is still going 
wrong. In fact, when we started Social Security, it was 1.5 percent of 
payroll, and now it is 12.4 percent of payroll. Seventy percent of 
American workers today pay more in their payroll tax than they do in 
the income tax. So we have been borrowing from Social Security right 
along, and this is the purple line coming up at the bottom and 
increasing to $10 trillion.
  Already today we have a $9 trillion unfunded liability in Social 
Security. That means if we invested $9 trillion today, with interest it 
could keep Social Security solvent for 75 years. The alternative is we 
continue to increase taxes on somebody, someplace, to pay promised 
Social Security benefits, or we cut those benefits.
  Now I want to talk about what we are about to approach this week, and 
that is having the largest increase in entitlement programs that has 
been passed by this Congress in 39 years.
  What happened 39 years ago? We amended the Social Security bill in 
1965 to include Medicare. The original estimates of the cost of 
Medicare as a percent of GDP is now just a small fraction of the actual 
costs of Medicare. In fact, Medicare is going bankrupt. It is going 
broke. There is going to be less money coming into Medicare and to 
Social Security than what is required to pay promised benefits. So we 
have been doing fiscal creative accounting, using general fund money 
trying to keep up. But now we are adding to the costs to Medicare by 
adding prescription drugs.
  Dr. Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at Hoover Institute. He says, 
``Why should seniors be singled out to be subsidized by taxpayers, 
except that their votes are being sought after by both parties?''
  That was true in 1965. Both sides of the aisle decided they wanted to 
get more votes from seniors, so they amended Social Security to add the 
Medicare program. Now both sides of the aisle and the President are 
trying

[[Page 15791]]

to get more votes from seniors, so we are adding a prescription drug 
program.
  I have 10 grandchildren, Mr. Speaker. They are going to be saddled 
with the largest debt in history. I see our Pages in this Chamber. They 
are the generation at risk. Why should they be asked to pay for a 
senior drug program? The retireing seniors today are probably the 
wealthiest seniors we are going to ever see in history.
  We are losing our manufacturing base. We are spreading ourselves so 
thin with more government spending that we are mounting a massive debt 
for our kids and our economy.
  Grandparents; as you look at prescription drugs, I think you have got 
to start thinking about what we are saddling our kids with.
  I would like to pose a question: Why should my kids, who are trying 
to save enough money for their kids to go to college, pay for 
prescription drugs for seniors?
  Let me ask another question, and that is about my 10 grandkids. Why 
should we pass this large increase in entitlement programs, which is 
going to mean a huge debt for all grandkids to deal with?
  What we are doing is increasing the debt of this country more rapidly 
than ever before in history. It took the first 200 years of this 
Congress, of this Nation, to amass a $450 billion debt, the first 200 
years. And now we are having a debt increase that we are passing on to 
our kids that amounts to about $450 billion per year.

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