[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 10]
[House]
[Pages 13432-13434]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          THE SPENDING PROBLEM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to the order of the House of 
January 5, 2011, the gentleman from Indiana, (Mr. Burton) will control 
the remainder of the time, 33 minutes.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
  Mr. Speaker, a lot of times people ask me why do you have a Special 
Order when the Chamber is not in session and it doesn't appear 
anybody's paying any attention. We all have monitors back in our 
offices, and many of our Members who are not in attendance get a chance 
to hear what other Members have to say during Special Orders. It also 
allows us, if people across the country happen to be paying attention 
to what's going on in Washington, it gives them a chance to see and 
hear some of the issues that we're talking about.
  One of the things that really concerns me that I hope everybody's 
concerned about is the terrible spending problem we have here in 
Washington, and that spending problem, and what that spending problem 
causes. When you spend more money and you print more money and it gets 
into circulation, that's called inflating the money supply. When you 
inflate the money supply, ultimately that means that everything that 
money buys goes up in cost.
  The trucks that transport our goods and services across the country 
have to pay for more diesel fuel, more for licenses, more for anything 
else; and all those costs are passed on to the people whose products 
they carry, and those people who make those products have to make a 
profit, so they have to raise the price of those products to the people 
who buy those products, whether it's a supermarket or a clothing store 
or whatever it is. Then when the consumer goes to buy those products 
that are transported, they have to pay more for them; and that's what 
we call inflation.
  Now, we have, in the last couple of years, during the Obama 
administration, and the last part of the Bush administration, passed a 
bailout bill and a stimulus bill that have cost, collectively, close to 
$2 trillion. That does not cover the other programs that have been 
increased, thus costing more money to the government and the taxpayer.
  Then just recently, because we had these terrible crises on Wall 
Street and the banking crisis that we've had, we had the bailout, which 
cost well over $1 trillion when you talk about the interest that's 
added to it; and because the economy continues to founder and we have 
unemployment that's above 9 percent, the Fed decided to have what they 
call QE1, quantitative easing, which increased the money supply again 
by several hundred billion dollars. And then we had quantitative 
easing, or QE2, which has raised the amount of money in circulation and 
exacerbated the problem that we're all facing today.
  So I'd like to talk just a little bit about how this affects the 
average person. Mr. Bernanke, who's the head of the Federal Reserve 
Board, said that we don't have to worry about inflation. He said that, 
long term, the inflation rate is not going to get above 1.7 to 2 
percent.
  But let's just look at what the average person has to pay when they 
go to the store or the gas station to buy products. Milk--and everybody 
drinks milk, especially if you have kids--has gone up 38 percent since 
last year. That means if you buy milk, for every dollar you're spending 
it costs $1.38, as opposed to last year. That's inflation.
  The price of sugar--and sugar's used in cookies and cakes and all the 
things that we use on a daily basis, chewing gum, everything--has gone 
up 20 percent since last year. That's inflation.

[[Page 13433]]

  The price of corn, which is used in feed for our animals, it's used 
in gasoline now, it's used on a daily basis by people across this 
country, corn has gone up 62 percent in the last year. So for each 
dollar that you spent for corn a year ago, now it costs $1.62.
  And as of August, the cost of beef, hamburger, steaks, whatever you 
buy, went up 13 percent over last year, and that amounts to about 52 
cents a pound. So when you go buy a pound of hamburger, it's going to 
cost about 52 cents more than it did a year ago. That's killing the 
American people.
  They tell us we do not have inflation, and anybody that goes to buy 
groceries or any commodity that's transported across this country is 
paying a heck of a lot more than they did last year. So when the 
administration and the Fed and the Treasury Department say we don't 
have an inflationary problem, talk to your wife, husband, talk to your 
wife. Wife, talk to your husband when he goes to buy gasoline.
  And everybody knows that the amount of money they're making is not 
keeping up with inflation. That's why we have to get control of 
spending here in Washington. We have to get control of the 
entitlements. We have to get control of every government agency, and we 
have to get rid of a lot of government agencies that are not doing 
anything to really help our economy or our country.
  Take, for instance, the Department of Education. Everybody says, 
well, we need to have a Department of Education. Why? Education is 
supposed to be conducted at the State and local level, controlled by 
the State and local governments. But we have an Education Department, 
and what has the Education Department contributed to our society? The 
quality of education has gone down, down, down, to where we're one of 
the least educated, as far as the quality of education is concerned, 
least educated countries in the western world, in the industrial world. 
So the Department of Education really isn't contributing anything 
except gobbling up an awful lot of our taxpayers' dollars. There's a 
whole host of agencies like that that we need to get rid of because we 
don't have the money to pay for them.
  And yet the President came up the other night and he spoke in this 
Chamber, and he said we're going to have to spend another $447 billion 
for a jobs bill. It's the same old story being written again and again 
by the administration. That's what we tried to do with the bailout and 
the stimulus bill and these other things.
  Remember the shovel-ready projects? The President said, well, we 
didn't have as many shovel-ready projects as we wanted to. As a result, 
we didn't see anything except more and more unemployment.
  Throwing money at the problem does not solve the problem. All it does 
is cost the taxpayers more money, either in taxes or in a hidden tax 
that they pay when they go to buy food, clothes, groceries, or gasoline 
to get to and from work; and that's the problem that we have right now.
  The President has a socialistic European approach to government. He 
believes that government ought to control health care. He believes that 
government ought to control the energy sector. And if we pass what was 
called cap-and-trade, which would deal with energy and the emission of 
CO2 into the atmosphere, it would raise the cost of 
electricity and everything else that we use dramatically. In fact, he 
said himself during his campaign, or even before that, that cap-and-
trade would essentially cause the prices to skyrocket for energy, just 
another thing that the American people have to pay for.
  We don't have the money in our pockets. People's salaries aren't 
going up. We've got a huge number of people unemployed. We're paying 
unemployment to them on a weekly basis so that they can survive. They 
don't have the money.
  But the government keeps spending and spending and spending, and we 
can no longer afford it because it's going to hit us with higher taxes. 
That's what he talked about right here last week: more taxes that we 
don't have, more spending that we can't afford, which leads to more 
inflation that people are feeling right now.

                              {time}  1510

  And if people don't believe me who may be paying attention to this, 
and I'm talking to my colleagues back in their offices, talk to your 
wife or your husband when they buy gasoline or go to the store. The 
average inflation rate right now I would guess is somewhere around 13 
percent, and that is something we cannot afford. It's going to kill 
this economy and kill this country as the country that we've known all 
of our lives, and what we're passing on to our children is a lower 
standard of living than we've had, and we cannot afford that any 
longer.
  What we need to do is streamline government, go back into our 
entitlements--Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security--and figure out 
better ways, not eliminate them, but better ways to solve that problem. 
This House has sent a plan over to the Senate that would do that in an 
efficient and economic way and not bankrupt the country and solve that 
problem.
  We need to go through every agency of government, and if they're not 
doing their job or if they're not necessary, get rid of them, cut them 
out, reduce the size of government, cut government spending.
  Then, in addition to that, we ought to do like Ronald Reagan did when 
he came into office and we had double-digit inflation; double-digit 
unemployment, and double-digit interest rates. It was actually as bad 
or worse than it is right now. And he came in and he said instead of 
raising taxes, as they said he had to do, because they said that would 
bring revenue into the Treasury, he said, no, we're going to cut taxes.
  And the reason he did that was because if you raise taxes, you take 
money out of business, you take money out of people's pockets, and 
that's money they can't spend. If they don't spend, they can't buy. If 
they can't buy, we don't produce. And if you don't produce, more and 
more people who do the producing are laid off and are going to the 
unemployment lines.
  Conversely, if you cut taxes, you give business and industry more 
money to invest. You give individuals more money to spend. They can buy 
more and invest more, and we produce more because people can buy it, 
and that creates jobs. And when we create jobs, we create more 
taxpayers. And we went from $500 billion in tax revenue under Reagan to 
$1.3 trillion--almost triple--because we cut taxes and stimulated 
economic growth.
  This administration believes in more government control over our 
entire economy and our society, and that's the reason we're in the mess 
we're in today, because government cannot create something unless it 
takes something away. We can't give jobs that the government creates 
unless we take it from you, the taxpayer, and that means either raise 
taxes or spend money we don't have and print it, and that creates 
inflation, which is a hidden tax on everybody in this country.
  The bottom line is this country is in a very difficult situation. I 
serve as chairman of the Subcommittee on Europe and Eurasia. I'm going 
to be going to Greece in a couple of weeks. Greece has a socialistic 
economy. They're going down the tubes right now, and they're trying to 
find some way to bail themselves out. They're raising taxes. They're 
raising taxes on everything, electricity, everything they can. They're 
cutting the benefits to the people that work there because the benefits 
have been too high and the government can't afford them. All of these 
things, the salaries are being cut.
  And what's happening in Greece is it's going belly up. And the effect 
of it is on all of the other countries that have investments in Greece, 
the banking, the financial institutions, all of them are really in 
trouble, and they're talking about a potential domino effect because of 
the failure of Greece and because of the socialistic approach that 
they've taken.
  Italy's in trouble, Portugal's in trouble, Spain's in trouble, even 
France is in trouble because they've invested a lot of money through 
the financial institutions into Greece. The whole European continent's 
in trouble because

[[Page 13434]]

of the socialistic approach to government.
  The thing that's kept America so strong all of our lives is free 
enterprise, the profit incentive for a businessman or a person to say, 
I want to make something of myself. And they open a gas station or a 
store and they work their tails off, and they have a chance to make 
their lives better. But when government starts taking over everything, 
it ruins it. That's what's happening in many countries in Europe, 
especially Greece.
  So if any of my colleagues are paying attention on the Democrat side 
of the aisle or who are Independents or who are on the Republican side, 
I hope that you will realize the number one thing we have to do right 
now is get this government under control.
  We need to cut regulations so business isn't strangled by the 
regulations that are costing them more and more money that they have to 
pass on to the consumer or they have to fire people because they can't 
afford them. We've got to cut taxes to stimulate economic growth, and 
that will bring more money into the Treasury, just like it did under 
President Reagan. And we've got to make sure that we eliminate 
unnecessary spending in these agencies of government like the 
Department of Education. Get rid of them because they're not doing 
anything except gobbling up our money.
  If we do that, we're going to turn this country around, and we will 
remain the greatest country in the history of mankind. If we don't, if 
we continue down the road that this administration is taking us down, 
moving us towards socialism, toward government control over health 
care, energy, everything, then we'll see the quality of life that we've 
enjoyed go right down the tubes. It's up to the American people, and 
it's up to us in Congress to take the bull by the horns and deal with 
this.
  So I say to my colleagues, please, pay attention to what I've said 
tonight. You may not agree with everything, but if you'll study the 
things that I've studied and look at what's going on in Europe, you'll 
understand very clearly that what I've said has merit, and we need to 
do it.
  With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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