[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 12]
[House]
[Pages 17308-17309]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1020
                           DO-NOTHING OPTION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. Eight days until the so-called supercommittee is to 
report. They're limping toward failure; although perhaps now they've 
found the way Washington always loves to do things--let's kick the can 
down the road. Let's pretend we did it. Let's say we'll adopt some 
future tax measures in the next 12 months that will get us to their 
rather modest goal of $1.2 trillion of deficit reduction over 10 years. 
I tell you what, the do-nothing option is starting to look a lot 
better. Now, that's something that Congress is really good at doing--
nothing.
  So what happens if we do nothing? Well, first you get the 
sequestration. There's much gnashing of teeth about that. But Congress 
will have discretion within accounts, within the Defense Department and 
elsewhere to find those cuts, which would be relatively modest over a 
10-year period. But then the better thing with the do-nothing option is 
if Congress really, really can do nothing and continues to do nothing 
for the rest of this session, then all the Bush tax cuts go away and 
that means $4 trillion of additional revenues with a little bit of 
shared sacrifice. It hits the people at the top mostly, takes them back 
to the Clinton-era rates of taxes. That's without closing tax loops and 
going through all that. Just let the Bush tax cuts expire; that would 
take care of 40 percent of the deficit problem over the next 10 years. 
Add in the sequestration from the failure of the committee another 1.2, 
plus the 1.3 we passed last summer, suddenly we're up to 67-70 percent 
of the projected deficit. That's pretty much what we need to do around 
here. And you can do it in an honest way, which is with revenues and 
spending reductions. That's how we balanced the budget in the 1990s. 
You can't do it all with just stopping cuts. Stop pretending that 
that'll work. It won't work.

[[Page 17309]]

  Now, there'll be much gnashing of teeth, particularly on Wall Street, 
about oh, Congress can't get things done, and we're worried. And the 
crooks are the unindicted co-conspirators at the ratings agencies. The 
same people who rated designed-to-fail mortgage collateralized debt 
obligations as AAA-plus investments are now concerned about the 
government of the United States and how it conducts itself in its 
honesty and dealing with these difficult problems. Well, you know, 
maybe they should take a look at the do-nothing option, too. If they're 
really concerned about debt reduction, the do-nothing option is the 
best.
  And then finally this week, Congress will have a chance to vote on a 
balanced budget amendment, the same one that passed in 1995. Let's 
think of what the world would look like today if the one that passed 
the House in 1995 had become the law of the land. We wouldn't have had 
10 years of Bush tax cuts at a cost of $5 trillion of new debt and no 
jobs. We wouldn't have had the wars fought on the credit card. We would 
have had to vote every year because we didn't declare war, and under 
this balanced budget amendment if you don't declare war and you have an 
overseas emergency, you have to vote every year on the spending. Maybe 
we wouldn't have spent those many hundreds of billions and trillions of 
dollars.
  And, finally, the prescription drug benefit designed to subsidize the 
pharmaceutical industry with borrowed money and that gives seniors a 
donut hole, we wouldn't have had that either.
  Now, I have liberal friends over here who say: Oh, we can't have a 
balanced budget amendment. That would be horrible. Well, just think, if 
those things hadn't happened and we didn't have $14 trillion of debt 
today, wouldn't we be in a place to make the investments we need to put 
America back to work and not burdening our kids with a mountain of 
debt? Think about it. A balanced budget amendment works both ways. This 
one's honest. It doesn't say supermajority for taxes. It doesn't say 
supermajority for cuts. It says you figure it out. You were elected, 
you figure it out. And do it in a way that both builds a country with a 
sustainable economy and gives us a financial future that isn't a huge 
burden to our kids.

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