[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 14]
[House]
[Pages 19571-19572]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                TRILLION DOLLAR DEFICITS NOT SUSTAINABLE

  (Mr. NEUGEBAUER asked and was given permission to address the House 
for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. NEUGEBAUER. Mr. Speaker, I originally came down here to talk 
about the fact that when my two grandsons, Nathan and Noah, need to 
know whether they need their tonsils out, we're going to let the doctor 
make that decision, not the President of the United States or the 
Speaker of the House. But then the gentleman from Massachusetts got up 
and was quoting a comment that Chairman Bernanke made the other day 
about the stimulus package.
  What he didn't talk about was the rest of the comment that Mr. 
Bernanke made when we said, The fact that we're borrowing 50 cents of 
every dollar that we spend, do you think that that would change your 
predictions down the road if we keep spending at this level?
  This is to quote the Chairman: ``Down the road, it might. As I talked

[[Page 19572]]

about in my testimony, I do think it's very important that we look at a 
medium-term fiscal sustainability, that we have a plan for getting back 
to reasonably low deficits and a sustainable debt-to-GDP ratio. 
Otherwise, we might see interest rates rise, which would be a negative 
for the economy.''
  I said, Do you think we can keep spending and having these trillion 
dollar deficits and not put our country--is that sustainable? Chairman 
Bernanke said, ``No, sir. It's not.''

                          ____________________