[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 14]
[House]
[Page 18474]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                PAYGO WILL BRING ABOUT FISCAL DISCIPLINE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Vermont (Mr. Welch) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. WELCH. Mr. Speaker, I'm here, too, to join in advocacy for the 
PAYGO legislation that is going to come before the House floor this 
week. PAYGO is what it sounds like. If we have a new program, we have 
to find a way to pay for it, either through cuts or revenues. If we 
have a proposed tax cut, we have to find a way to pay for it, either in 
a reduction in programs elsewhere or a shifting of priorities and 
spending.
  It is a very simple, elemental approach. If you're going to buy 
something, you have to pay for it. Families know it, in their family 
budgets, they have to do it all of the time. And government really is 
no different. It is no different because in the end, if we borrow 
money, at some point we are going to have to pay it back. We have 
gotten into a habit in this Congress of not paying for things, in some 
cases, expenditure programs, and in other cases tax cuts.
  We have had some back and forth this morning with our friends on the 
other side of the aisle, and without getting into the blame game, which 
doesn't get us anywhere, there is an irrefutable fact, and that is that 
in the past 8 years with the tax cuts, with Medicare part D that was 
not funded, with a war in Iraq and a war in Afghanistan on the credit 
card, we have gone from the largest surplus in the history of this 
country to the largest deficit in the history of this country.
  What it means is that our kids and our grandkids are the ones who are 
going to have to pick up the tab. Aside from the fact that that is 
obviously unfair and none of us wants to pass the burden of debt for 
our spending on to others, it really is going to restrict what it is 
that generation can do to meet its own challenges to educate its kids, 
to provide health care to its kids and themselves and to provide for 
the national defense.
  We have the capacity to impose on ourselves the same rule that 
families have to impose on themselves every month when they sit around 
the kitchen table and go over their checkbook and try to figure out 
how, at the end of the month, they are going to make the checkbook 
balance. And that is to accept the burden of the discipline of paying 
for our tax cut proposal or our spending proposal when we make the 
proposal.
  Voters know that. They want fiscal responsibility. In fact, their 
concern about the deficit rightly is at the top of their agenda. We 
have had extraordinary circumstances here that have required 
extraordinary actions with the economy going off the cliff, with the 
stimulus spending and with the legacy of a war in Iraq and Afghanistan 
on the credit card.
  We have restored truth in budgeting so that those two things, the 
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, are now on the budget. So it is painful 
because we are seeing in black and white what the cost of those 
enterprises are, and we know that we are going to have to pay for them. 
We are not trying to hide it. We are being direct.
  The American people are entitled to that candor, and they are 
entitled to have us respond by making certain that we, going forward, 
adopt pay-as-you-go principles. It is not just good in theory, and it 
is not just good for conservatives or liberals. It is good for 
everybody.
  I'm a big supporter, I think most of us are, that in this country we 
achieve the goal of having all of our citizens covered by health care. 
Every citizen should be covered and have access to health insurance. 
Every citizen should help pay for it. And if you lose your job, you 
shouldn't lose your health care. The President has acknowledged that as 
worthy as that goal is, we must pay for it. And the health care bill 
that we are now considering has to be paid for. What a difference from 
what happened with the prescription drug program that was largely put 
on the credit card and it is not able to sustain itself or pay for 
itself.
  One of the reasons it is so important to have PAYGO is that it 
imposes the discipline on us to kick the tires of a program. Health 
care is a great example. We need it. We have good health care in this 
country. But the cost is going up at two or three times the rate of 
inflation, two or three times the rate of profit growth, two or three 
times the rate of wage growth. So people are falling behind. The middle 
class is getting squeezed. They are facing higher co-pays and 
deductibles. By adopting PAYGO, it is forcing us to look at our 
delivery system and ask yourselves how can we reform the delivery of 
health care to make it more efficient and provide more value for less 
money?
  In fact, there are examples after examples of how we have, in many 
cases, excess utilization. So this bill is going to be helpful to all 
of us. And it is very important that we pass this legislation.

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