[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 12]
[House]
[Page 16149]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           BUDGET ENFORCEMENT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Texas (Mr. Stenholm) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. STENHOLM. Mr. Speaker, an earlier speaker tonight said the 
economy is showing signs of some considerable improvement. Jobs are 
being created, GDP is increasing. Well, it should. We have borrowed 
$2.5 trillion in the last 3\1/2\ years and spent it. We should get the 
kind of results with that amount of borrowing.
  Last week, the administration failed to meet the deadline to release 
the mid-session review of the budget. If the administration had 
released the mid-session review, it would have shown that our budget is 
in a deep hole. As my colleagues have heard me say many times, when you 
find yourself in a hole, the first rule is to quit digging. Soon we 
will have an announcement of another record deficit, somewhere between 
$425 billion and $500 billion.
  Under the simple concept of pay-as-you-go, if we want to pass a tax 
cut or spending increase, we need to say how we would pay for it. We 
need to take two shovels away from Congress and the President to stop 
us from digging the hole deeper. The original PAYGO legislation was 
part of the bipartisan 1990 budget agreement between President George 
Herbert Walker Bush and the Democratic Congress. It was subsequently 
extended in 1993 and 1997, but was allowed to expire in 2002 by 
President Bush and the Republican Congress.
  We should be spending our time trying to find a bipartisan solution 
to balance our budget, but that may be too much to expect from this do-
nothing 108th Congress. Not only has this Congress failed to make any 
serious efforts to reduce the deficit, we have allowed the budget 
enforcement tools, which we have proven the track record of in 
controlling the deficit, to expire. Last month, the House spent 7 hours 
on this floor debating 19 amendments on budget process reform, but the 
House leadership would not even allow an up-and-down vote on the Blue 
Dog budget enforcement proposals because the leadership knew that it 
would have enough bipartisan support to pass.

                              {time}  1945

  Now, I associate myself with the remarks of the gentleman from 
Nebraska who just spoke regarding marriage. I strongly support middle-
class tax relief. I support extending the marriage penalty relief, the 
$1,000 per child tax credit and the 10 percent tax bracket. What I 
oppose is passing these tax cuts with borrowed money and leaving our 
children and grandchildren to pay our bills.
  Those who want to extend expiring tax cuts or make the tax cuts 
permanent, which they will try to do again this week, adding another 
$120 to $180 billion to our deficit, should be willing to put forward 
the spending cuts or the offsetting necessary to pay for them.
  Applying pay-as-you-go rules to tax cuts does not prevent Congress 
from passing more tax cuts. All it says is that if we are going to 
reduce our revenues, we need to reduce our spending by the same amount 
so the deficit does not get deeper.
  If Republicans actually meant what they say about controlling 
spending, they would have no problem with applying pay-as-you-go to tax 
cuts, because it would force Congress to actually control spending when 
we pass tax cuts instead of just promising to do so in the future.
  The problem is the actions of Republicans have not matched their 
rhetoric. They cut taxes without cutting spending and charge the 
difference to our children and grandchildren.
  Last year we increased the debt limit by $984 billion. The current 
debt limit is $7.384 trillion. At the close of business last Friday, 
our total national debt stood at $7,273,792,456,490.62. It appears very 
likely the debt limit will be reached sometime in late September or 
October, with the most likely date being early October.
  It is time for Congress to deal seriously with our Nation's fiscal 
affairs. We cannot keep having 70 percent of our debt being bought by 
foreigners and not paying the bill sooner or later.

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