[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 8]
[House]
[Pages 11670-11671]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1040
           THE COST OF FAILURE EXCEEDS THE PRICE OF PROGRESS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Maryland (Mr. Hoyer) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, ladies and gentlemen of this House, I am 
pleased to rise with my colleague and dear friend Barbara Lee to focus 
on an issue that all too frequently is ignored. I rise to speak as we 
are engaged in an extraordinarily important discussion, debate, and 
responsibility. That responsibility is to ensure that America pays its 
bills; that America's creditworthiness is not put at risk; and that an 
America which has incurred obligations meets those obligations to 
individuals and to others, as we have made policies that have cost 
money and it is now necessary for us to pay the bills that we have 
already incurred.
  But as we engage in that debate and discussion, we must remember that 
there is in our country one child out of every five who is living in 
poverty, who is worried about proper food, proper housing, proper 
medical care. Children who are, in fact, at risk. We now in America, 
the richest nation on the face of the Earth, have the largest number of 
people living in poverty that we have had in over seven decades.
  And so as we engage in this debate, it is important that we take this 
time to focus on those who all too often are invisible, who all too 
often are not the center of our discussion, who all too often are 
perceived to simply be those who will not matter at the voting booth.
  Each of us in this House has a compass formed in many respects by our 
faith. My faith teaches me I have a responsibility to my God to reach 
out to the least among us to lift them up, to care for them, to clothe 
them, to feed them, to house them, to make sure that as a part of our 
American family, they are not forgotten. They are not by negligence 
driven more deeply into despair, unhealth, sickness, and a negative 
lifestyle which costs us all and costs those individuals.
  I come from the State of Maryland, and I want to quote somebody you 
would think it may be unusual for me to quote, but I was elected to the 
State senate in 1966. Ted Agnew was elected Governor of our State in 
1966, and he was inaugurated 2 weeks after I was sworn in as a member 
of the State senate at the age of 27. In his inaugural address he said: 
The cost of failure far exceeds the price of progress. What he meant by 
that, the failure to invest in the welfare of our people, as well as 
our infrastructure and the creation of jobs and the expansion of 
opportunity for our people, the failure to make those investments would 
in the long run cost us far more than the investments would cost us in 
the short run.
  My colleagues, I suggest to you that our failure to invest in the 
welfare of all of our citizens will cost us far greater sums in the 
long run for the failure to invest in the short run.
  And so I congratulate Barbara Lee from California for making sure 
that the least of us are not forgotten in this very important debate.
  Do we need to bring down spending? We do. But one of the interesting 
facets of every report that has been issued in a bipartisan way, most 
recently by the so-called Gang of Six, or the Simpson-Bowles 
Commission, or the Senator Domenici-Alice Rivlin Commission--all

[[Page 11671]]

had a central premise: Do not take actions that undermine the most 
vulnerable among us. Those were all bipartisan commissions.
  I know my friends on the Republican side of the aisle who pride 
themselves on being the party of Lincoln understand Lincoln's message 
of healing and bringing us together and making sure that we lifted up 
our fellow citizens and cared for the sick and the homeless and for the 
young and, yes, for the old.
  So as I said, I thank Chairwoman Lee, such a courageous and powerful 
voice on behalf of those who sometimes have no voice. I am pleased to 
join my voice to hers and hopefully to all 435 of us who have been 
given the privilege of serving in this body to raise our voices on this 
day on behalf of a Nation that has been perceived around the world as 
being a Nation of hope, of opportunity, of heart, and of soul. Let us 
reflect that in whatever way we go forward in ensuring the fiscal 
health of our Nation, both in the short term and in the long term. And 
understand that the health of our people physically, mentally, 
financially will be equally important to the health of our Nation.
  I thank the gentlelady for leading this debate.

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