[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 3]
[House]
[Pages 4196-4197]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           THE STIMULUS BILL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Burton) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, today we passed the largest 
spending bill in the history of the United States. When you add the 
interest and everything into it, it is going to cost over $1 trillion. 
I don't think the American people really understand how much $1 
trillion is, but it is an awful lot of money.
  I want to congratulate my Democrat colleagues on getting this passed. 
I certainly did not vote for this bill. I think it is going to be very 
detrimental to the future economy of these United States, and I think 
it is going to hurt our economy instead of creating the jobs that it 
was intended to create. So I think we made a big mistake today, but the 
Democrats got their bill passed, and they're going to get it passed in 
the Senate. It is going to become law, and every American is going to 
have to live with it.
  One of the things that concerns me is not only the $1 trillion we 
have spent today but that Mr. Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury, 
said the other day that we would have to spend another $1 trillion, $2 
trillion or maybe even more to help the financial institutions of this 
country stay afloat. So we're looking at $2-, $3-, $4-, maybe $5 
trillion.
  If you will look at this chart, Mr. Speaker, it shows the amount of 
money that is in circulation. You will see it was pretty consistent at 
around $1 trillion-plus over the last couple of decades. Then just 
recently, it shot up like a rocket, and that was before all of this 
spending that we put through the House today or the amount of money 
that Mr. Geithner is going to spend. So we are looking at a tremendous 
increase in the amount of money that is going to be in circulation.
  Now, one of the things that helps stave off this inflationary problem 
is that we have people around the world, other countries, that loan us 
money. For instance, China right now has loaned us $682 billion. That 
is what we

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owe them. We owe Japan $577 billion. We owe the United Kingdom $360 
billion. We owe Brazil $120 billion to $130 billion.
  China said just the other day that they were very concerned about 
loaning us money because they said that they did not think that the 
currency in the United States would be stable, so the value of their 
currency would go down. They were calling Mr. Geithner, Secretary 
Geithner, to say, ``Hey, we want some stability here because the value 
of the currency in our country is going to be depreciated because of 
what you're doing.''
  Well, a day later, after it was brought up on this floor, they 
changed their minds and said, ``Well, the only place to loan this money 
where we have any kind of security is the United States. We are going 
to continue to loan money.'' So they are going to loan money to us in 
the billions and in the trillions of dollars, but the kicker is: How 
much is the interest going to be that they're going to charge? Because 
that interest is added to the loan that they are giving us on a month-
to-month basis. I believe they kicked that interest rate up, so we are 
going to see an inflationary trend not only in the money they are 
loaning to us but in the interest that is going to be accumulating.
  I know this is an awful lot for my colleagues to digest and for the 
people across this country who might be paying attention to digest, but 
let me just say this, Mr. Speaker: It is going to cause an inflationary 
trend at some point in the future. I think it is going to be earlier 
rather than later. When that inflationary trend starts, this chart is 
going to be minuscule to what we are going to see. We are going to see 
inflation shoot up at a very rapid rate, which means that the value of 
the dollar that every American has in their bank or in their home is 
going to be devalued.
  That means, if you buy a car for $30,000, it may cost $60,000 or 
$90,000. If you buy a loaf of bread, it may cost 2 or 3 times as much 
or more. That is called hyperinflation. This happened back in the 1970s 
when we had a very similar situation to what we have today. We had 
double-digit inflation, double-digit unemployment, and they raised the 
interest rates to 21 percent to stop all of this. That may happen 
again. If it does, it will put a real hammer on the economy, and it 
will put more and more and more, thousands and millions of people out 
of work.
  But the problem early on is the inflation that we are going to have 
to deal with. This is a problem that is very real, and I hope my 
Democrat colleagues will think ahead and will realize that we have to 
do something to stifle the growth in government and the spending 
because we are not going to be able to deal with this inflation as we 
should, and our kids and our grandkids and the future generations of 
this country are going to have to pay, not only with inflation, but 
with higher taxes and with a lower quality of life. That is something 
we should not have to deal with, Mr. Speaker.

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