[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 9]
[House]
[Pages 12025-12026]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                      SPENDING-DRIVEN DEBT CRISIS

  (Ms. FOXX asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute.)
  Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, our record debt of $14.3 trillion is growing, 
and it poses a direct threat to our national security, our economy, and 
our children's future. The American people deserve real leadership 
right now, not politics as usual.
  The President's bipartisan deficit commission called the House-passed 
Path to Prosperity a ``serious, honest, straightforward approach to 
addressing our Nation's enormous fiscal challenges.'' On the contrary, 
the Democratic cochair of the commission, Erskine Bowles, recently 
criticized the

[[Page 12026]]

President's fiscal plan, introduced on April 13, by stating that ``When 
you compare it to the Ryan plan and to the commission's plan, it really 
doesn't stabilize the debt. The debt, as a percentage of GDP, gets up 
to around 77 percent, and it never gets to primary balance.''
  If President Obama and the Democrat leaders of the Senate wish to 
take solving our spending-driven debt crisis seriously, the solution is 
simple: Washington must stop spending money it doesn't have.

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