[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 11]
[House]
[Page 15239]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                  WHERE ARE THE FISCAL CONSERVATIVES?

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Tennessee (Mr. Duncan) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, we have now spent approximately $200 
billion, $200 billion, on the war in Afghanistan against a foe that has 
almost no money and equipment, especially in comparison to ours. Now we 
are about to take up a supplemental appropriations bill later today to 
provide many billions more, all this in a place where even General 
Petraeus said we should remember has been known as the ``graveyard of 
empires.'' This comes on top of approximately $800 billion on the war 
in Iraq and hundreds of billions more in indirect costs for these two 
wars.
  Then, in the supplemental bill that we'll take up later today, we 
have $5 billion for the International Monetary Fund, and in this bill, 
there is a guarantee for $100 billion in loans made by the IMF, loans 
being made to other countries. All this money will have to be borrowed 
because we are so many trillions in debt already that it is not even 
humanly comprehensible.
  The bill also contains $7.7 billion for swine flu vaccines. I heard a 
reporting of a speech of our colleague, the gentleman from Texas, Dr. 
Paul, made recently, in which he said during his first stay in the 
House, in I think it was 1976, that there was another swine flu scare, 
and that only he and one other person, probably the only other medical 
doctor in the House at that time, voted against the money for the swine 
flu scare. And one person died from swine flu that year, and many more 
died from taking the vaccine than died from the flu. This is a great 
overreaction in this area as well. Many thousands are dying from other 
diseases that we're not paying attention to.
  This supplemental appropriations bill started out at $85 billion, 
then it went to $91 billion, then $95 billion, and now, today, $106 
billion. And I ask you, are there no fiscal conservatives around here?
  We read last year that the Pentagon had $295 billion in cost overruns 
on just their 72 largest weapons systems. Now, that didn't count all 
the cost overruns that they might have had in all their thousands of 
other large-, medium-, and small-sized contracts, and we're having a 
hearing right today--in fact, it's going on right now, I was there 
earlier--in the Oversight and Government Reform Committee in which they 
said 74 percent of the private contracts that the Federal Government 
gives out are given out by the Pentagon. Are there no fiscal 
conservatives at the Pentagon?
  I know everybody is trying to prove how patriotic they are today, and 
everybody feels that we shouldn't question anything the Defense 
Department wants. But to allow $295 billion in cost overruns on just 
these 72 largest weapons systems, in my opinion, it's unpatriotic not 
to question that. And I ask again, are there no fiscal conservatives at 
the Pentagon?
  The fact is, we've turned the Defense Department primarily into the 
``Department of Foreign Aid'' now, and I believe very strongly in 
national defense. But we cannot afford to run the whole world, and we 
cannot afford to have the Department of Defense be the ``Department of 
Foreign Aid.''
  All of this comes not long after we have raised our national debt 
limit to over $13 trillion. Nobody can comprehend a figure like that, 
no one. That is an astounding figure. And yet on top of this debt that 
we already have, the President's budget in this year and the next 2 
years will add over $4 trillion of debt to that debt, $4 trillion in 
this year and the next two; three years' time, $4 trillion added to our 
national debt.
  And then this year, if I had told people 2 or 3 years ago that we 
would have a budget this year of $3.6 trillion and that half of that, 
$1.87 trillion, would be deficit, nobody would have believed that. They 
would have thought that I was ridiculous or that I was crazy in saying 
that.
  I used to say to my colleagues that it was terrible what we were 
doing to our children and grandchildren. Now, I'm saying it's terrible 
what we're doing to ourselves because it's not going to be 5 or 10 
years, if that long, before we're not able to pay all of our Social 
Security and veterans' pensions and all of the things that we have 
promised our own people.
  We've got to stop trying to run the whole world. It's not 
isolationist to say that because I believe in trade and tourism, and 
cultural and educational exchanges, and I believe we should help during 
humanitarian crises. But we can't keep spending hundreds of billions of 
dollars in other countries, whether it's done by the Defense 
Department--and of course, it's also being done by every other 
department and agency in the entire Federal Government.

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