[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 11]
[House]
[Page 15255]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             FISCAL CRISES

  (Mr. HIMES asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. HIMES. Mr. Speaker, the U.S. is facing a fiscal crisis which we 
must soon begin to address. This will not be easy, but there are two 
clear things that we know we must do.
  First, we know we must fix the spiraling cost of our health care 
system, and those who would point to our Federal deficits ignore the 
much larger numbers associated with the promises that we have made 
through Medicare and Social Security that we are going to have trouble 
keeping if we don't take a hard look at those things.
  Secondly, as the economy recovers, this House must put the brakes on 
government spending. That's why I am delighted that, tomorrow, this 
House will take up pay-as-you-go legislation that would simply say: You 
pay for what you spend. You either have the guts to ask the citizenry 
to pay for it via taxation or you choose other things that you don't 
want to spend it on. We've seen PAYGO rules in place before, in the 
1990s, when the government ran surpluses and when we saw unrivaled 
prosperity.
  So we need to look back at that and have the discipline to pass that 
legislation so that we restore confidence in our fiscal probity and in 
the prosperity to our economy.

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