[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 11]
[House]
[Page 15881]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




           A BATTLE FOR THE ECONOMIC SURVIVAL OF THIS NATION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Tennessee (Mr. Duncan) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DUNCAN of Tennessee. Mr. Speaker, you can never satisfy 
government's appetite for money and land; they always want more. Now we 
are $17 trillion in debt and are headed to $25 trillion in less than a 
decade under the best case scenario. Those are figures that are humanly 
incomprehensible; yet our estimates of our future unfunded pension 
liabilities are much, much higher. They are, probably, at least $75 
trillion or more.
  The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is the one that has put 
out these estimates, and they estimated recently that interest on the 
national debt will quadruple in less than 10 years to an astounding 
$857 billion in just 1 year. If we allow that to happen, the Federal 
Government could then pay only for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, 
and interest on the debt--nothing for defense, national parks, 
interstate highways, and so forth. Obviously, future Congresses cannot 
or would not allow that to happen, so they will then come in with a 
combination of huge tax increases and a tremendous inflation of the 
currency.
  The fight we are in now is over a lot more than the ``Unaffordable 
Care Act.'' It is a battle for the economic survival of this Nation. 
Anyone who wants their Social Security or their Federal or military 
pensions in order to be able to buy anything--or buy much at all in the 
very near future--should be demanding much more fiscal conservatism 
now. We either bite some very painful bullets now or we face much more 
difficult times in the very near future that will make our present 
problems look small in comparison. We could end up with problems like 
Detroit has now, but multiplied all across this Nation.
  President Obama, when he was in the Senate, opposed raising the debt 
ceiling and said we shouldn't do it to our children and our 
grandchildren; and when we are in this war now over this spending, this 
battle for the economic survival of our Nation, Mr. Speaker, surely we 
do not want to ruin the future of our children and our grandchildren.

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