[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 13]
[House]
[Page 18426]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                      THE GROWING FEDERAL DEFICIT

  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, if only what the previous 
speaker said were true. If only he really cared about a balanced 
budget. There is an amendment that would require Congress to spend no 
more money than it collects in taxes, and it has been languishing in 
this House for 1,560 days. Every day that Dennis Hastert has been 
Speaker, we have not had one opportunity to vote on a balanced budget 
amendment. It was written by a Republican, a nice guy by the name of 
Ernie Istook. His own Speaker will not let us vote on it.
  But if you guys are as serious as you say you are about a balanced 
budget, you can walk right over here, you can sign discharge petition 
number three, and it would force a vote not on my balanced budget 
amendment, not on Congressman Stenholm's balanced budget amendment but 
on your colleague Ernest Istook's amendment to balance the budget. Your 
own guy. Tell your own Speaker you want to vote on your own guy to 
balance the budget.
  Let me remind you why you need to do that. Two years ago, May 9, we 
passed the President's spending plan. The President's tax cuts passed 
with almost every Republican vote, passed with a couple of Democratic 
votes. I voted against it. I did not think it would work. It turns out 
this time I was right. In just over 2 years under that budget passed by 
you guys, you have increased the national debt by $1 trillion.
  Let us put that in reference. If you went all the way from the 
Revolutionary War to 1979, the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the 
Mexican-American War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World 
War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam, built the interstate highway 
system, built the Golden Gate Bridge, the intercoastal waterway, we 
borrowed less than $1 trillion. In 25 months, you guys have borrowed $1 
trillion.
  The Speaker in the chair knows what a $1,000 check looks like. It is 
what a lot of us write for rent checks up here in Washington. If you 
wrote that $1,000 rent check a thousand times, you have spent a 
million. If you wrote a $1 million check a thousand times, you have 
spent a billion. If you wrote a $1 billion check a thousand times, you 
have spent a trillion. That is how much money a trillion is.
  In just the past 12 months, you have increased the national debt by 
$544 billion. More importantly, you have stolen $371 billion from the 
Social Security trust fund. Mr. Speaker, the reason I say stolen is if 
you take it back and you do not have a plan to repay it, it is 
stealing. If someone pays on their payroll taxes toward Social 
Security, they fully expect it to be put in a trust fund just for 
Social Security and that it is going to be sitting there for when they 
need it.
  That is not the plan, Mr. Speaker. I would encourage you or any of my 
colleagues to tell me the name of the bank account that the Social 
Security trust fund is put in. Because you know and I know there is not 
a dime in it. It is nothing but IOUs, government securities.
  You have borrowed $167 billion from Medicare, the same thing. Hard-
working Americans pay payroll taxes. On that payroll tax is a line item 
that goes to Medicare with the promise that it would be set aside just 
for their retirement. There is not a penny there.
  Military retirement, the Federal employees' retirement, we owe the 
Federal employees' retirement system, Mr. Speaker, over $500 billion. 
There are laws that would have prevented you back when you were in your 
medical practice from dipping into your employees' retirement fund for 
any reason, good or bad. If you had done so, you would have gone to 
jail. There is not a penny in the Federal employees' retirement fund. 
Yet you continue to borrow against it to disguise the true nature of 
the American debt.
  You borrowed $314 billion from foreign investors, and my buddy from 
Cuba will love this one, because you have borrowed $52.5 billion from 
Communist China. You have borrowed $122 billion from Japan. We now owe 
$1.3 trillion to foreign nations and investors, including $122 billion 
to Communist China. Tell me you are proud of that. Tell me the 
Republican majority is proud that we owe $122 billion to China and that 
$50 billion a year of American tax dollars go to pay interest on what 
we owe just to foreigners like the Communist Chinese. Our children will 
have to pay back China, Japan, our foreign creditors before they can 
even get back to paying what we should have paid all along to Social 
Security, Medicare and the retirement funds. They have to repay our 
debts before they ever repay theirs.
  This is the Republican place in history. You are responsible for more 
deficit spending this year than in any year in American history. Tell 
me you are proud of that. You are responsible for the largest increase 
in the national debt in American history. Tell me you are proud of 
that.
  Mr. GARRETT of New Jersey. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. TAYLOR of Mississippi. When the gentleman walks down there and 
signs the discharge petition for the balanced budget amendment, I will 
yield to him all night long. Until then, if he does not believe in a 
balanced budget, do not come down here and tell me, gee, we found $17 
billion we were missing. Because the truth is, and you probably do not 
even know this, you could cancel all of the discretionary spending in 
the United States budget right now and you still will not balance the 
budget.

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