[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 19]
[House]
[Pages 25185-25186]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         HALLOWEEN BUDGET SCARE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Inglis) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. INGLIS. Madam Speaker, tonight I want to talk about where we are 
with the budget deficit.
  Just in time for Halloween, we are looking at scary numbers: an 
annual deficit of $1.42 trillion, accumulated debt of $13 trillion. 
It's a real fright. So, what does it compare to in our history?
  Well, here we have a chart that shows the historical debt levels of 
the United States. This is debt owed to the public, not 
intergovernmental debt. But what it shows is that after World War II 
there was a substantial amount of debt owed to the public; in fact, it 
was over 100 percent of our gross domestic product. Since then, it has 
gone down nicely, and that's a good thing. But here, lately, you can 
see the trajectory over there of where we're headed to, another 
dangerously high level of debt; again, an accumulated debt right now of 
$13 trillion, and this year will throw on 1.42 trillion from this 
year's annual deficit.
  But the historical debt level gives us a little bit of comfort 
because it shows that after World War II we had a higher percentage of 
debt than we do now. But there is a big difference between the debt 
after World War II and the debt today. As you can see here, the 
comparison of our creditors on this debt is what's really telling and 
what, again, just in time for Halloween, is rather frightening.
  In 1945, 95 percent of the debt was owed to the U.S. public; only 5 
percent of it we were looking at back then was foreign investment. Now, 
then, in 2009, that $13 trillion debt that I was just talking about, 
the U.S. public owns only 54 percent of that debt. China

[[Page 25186]]

owns 11 percent, other foreign countries, 35 percent.
  So the very scary thing is that, unlike World War II where we had a 
higher percentage of debt compared to GDP but we owed it to ourselves, 
now with this $13 trillion debt, we owe it to foreign countries, not to 
ourselves.
  The very sad thing for me as a member of the Republican Study 
Committee is that if we had enacted the conservative budgets that we 
proposed since 2005, we would be, right now, $613 billion to the 
better, because over those years, we proposed here on this House floor 
the most conservative budget alternatives offered. Had they been 
enacted, we would have been looking at $613 billion less than what we 
are looking at now by way of debt.
  Now, from here, it gets even scarier, because this chart shows the 
effect of President Obama's proposed budget in 2010. As you can see, 
government spending as a percentage of GDP--that's what this chart is 
showing is government spending as a percentage of GDP--you can see it 
taking off at a trajectory that truly is frightening. The Republican 
alternative budgets, as you can see there, show a trend line down so 
that we would be moving away from government spending as a percentage 
of GDP. It would actually be declining over the years to come.
  So, the question for us as Americans is: How are we going to cope 
with the fact that we've got a $13 trillion accumulated debt? First 
thing we could do is cancel the unspent part of the stimulus package; 
that's $787 billion. Only 13 percent of it has been spent. Surely we 
can cut that out. The next thing we can do is make sure we do no harm 
in health care, and that means avoiding yet another government program 
like Medicare and Medicaid that involve cost shift. That means that 
private sector employers and people covered by their own insurance will 
have to make up for the shortfall created by the cost shift that comes 
from these underpaying government programs. But even in their 
underpayment, they create an enormous government deficit problem.
  So, Madam Speaker, the message I think to all of us, Republicans and 
Democrats, the President and the Congress, is to come together to 
figure out a way to get this trajectory down, to not be looking at this 
kind of government spending that takes off, but rather to bring that 
down.

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