[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 4]
[House]
[Pages 4388-4389]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




      BALANCING THE COST OF WAR AGAINST THE COST OF TAX REDUCTION

  (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, the biggest problem with the tax 
cut that President Bush has proposed is not that it is going to require 
over $4 trillion in lost Federal revenue over the next decade, it is 
not that it is going to create more than a $2 trillion deficit, and it 
is not that the majority of it is going to go to those who need it the 
least, the biggest problem is that we do not know what the cost of the 
war is.
  We have gone down this road before and we wound up quadrupling the 
public debt. The responsible thing to do is to hold off on tax cuts 
until we know what the cost of this conflict in Iraq will amount to, 
until we have some sense of how long we are going to have to stay 
there, until we have some sense of what it will cost to reconstruct 
that country, until we have some sense of what it will cost to 
establish a stable democracy before we get out of there and allow it to 
return to the kind of despotic leadership that it is subject to today.
  So let us be prudent. Let us hold off on tax cuts. If we must, we 
should proceed with a prudent foreign policy with regard to the Middle 
East. Let us rid the world of weapons of mass destruction to the extent 
we can do so, but let us not break the bank in the United States and 
pass the bill on to our children.

[[Page 4389]]

  Let us be prudent and fiscally responsible. Let us put off tax cuts 
until we know what kind of expense we are undertaking with regard to 
the war in Iraq.

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