[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 14]
[Senate]
[Page 20584]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                                DEFICITS

  Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, the question is, Do deficits matter? We 
often say they do. You will hear Republicans say they do, and for the 
last week or two, you have heard from Democrats that they were against 
cutting taxes because it might add to the deficit. Well, if this is 
true, tonight we will get a chance to vote on the deficit because, you 
see, Congress about 6 years ago, put something forward called pay-go 
budget caps. What does that mean? They kept seeing the deficit explode. 
So they put in these budget caps, and if we were to adhere to them, we 
would actually get the debt under control. Guess what. Congress has 
evaded them 29 times.
  So tonight we will have a bill, and it will be the 30th time that 
Congress has evaded their own rules on the debt. Is it any surprise 
that the debt under George W. Bush went from $5 trillion to $10 
trillion? Is it any surprise that under President Obama it went from 
$10 trillion to $20 trillion? Is it any surprise that the debt 
continues to rise? No, because both parties are responsible for it.
  Look, I was all for the tax cut. I think it is good for the country, 
but I am also for restraining spending. So we did the tax cut earlier 
in the week, and now we are going to do a spending bill. We have rules 
in place, and the rules in place say that there are budget caps. So 
they have a special little waiver that they have put in the spending 
bills because we are now going to exceed those caps.
  So the question is, Are we serious about the debt? Are we serious 
about adding a million dollars a minute to the debt? That is what 
happens. We borrow a million dollars a minute. The deficit this year 
will be over $700 billion--$20 trillion in total. The total debt is 
bigger than our entire economy.
  So both sides give lip service to it, and yet both sides want more 
spending. On the Republican side, this year's request is $80 billion 
above the caps for military. On the Democratic side, they say: Well, 
you don't get yours unless we get ours. Yet nobody cares about the 
debt. So really the debt is being driven by the GOP, who want more 
military money but the only way they can get it is giving the Democrats 
more welfare money.
  So the interesting thing about this vote is--you have heard the other 
side of the aisle saying it--they can't vote for the tax cut because of 
the debt. If they care about the debt, let's cut spending. This is 
their chance. This will be a vote on cutting spending. These pay-go 
budget caps were put in place by the Democrats when they were in the 
majority in 2010. These are their budget caps, and yet everybody is 
clamoring to waive them on both sides.
  We have a real problem in our country, and we must do something about 
it. Ultimately, there will be a day of reckoning. You cannot continue 
to borrow so much money. Ultimately, it bankrupts the Nation, or the 
currency becomes worthless, or you get to a point where the interest on 
the debt actually becomes the No. 1 spending item. Within about a 
decade, interest will push out all other spending, and it will be the 
No. 1 item. We will spend more on interest than national defense. We 
will spend more on interest than welfare and anything else. So there 
are those who say: Well, we have to have more money for military; we 
have to have more money for welfare. You are going to have none of that 
if you keep spending money at this rate because we are going to ruin 
the country through debt.
  So can we have a strong military? Yes. We spend about $600 billion, 
but you can't necessarily spend $700 billion. That extra $100 billion 
is making the debt worse. But it is the same on the other side of the 
ledger with the Democrats.
  So we have a chance. There really is a chance. The media would say: 
Oh, you are irresponsible for voting for the tax cuts. No, you are 
irresponsible if you are not also willing to vote for spending cuts.
  So tonight I will put forward in a few minutes a motion, and this 
motion will be to say that we should obey the spending caps. We have 
put them in place. Unless our outrage over debt is fake outrage, if we 
truly care about the debt, we should vote to keep in place the rules we 
have put in place. These are spending caps. If we care about the next 
generation, we should vote for the spending caps. So I will put forward 
a motion that says: Let's obey our own rules.
  It will be interesting to watch the vote and to see how it turns 
out--who truly cares about the debt on either side of the aisle, who is 
willing to say: You know what; I am for tax cuts but I am also for 
saying across the board that we need to have spending restraint. Will 
we obey our own rules? We have broken our own rules. This will be the 
30th time we broke our own rules on budget caps since 2010. If you go 
back farther, it is in the hundreds of times. If you were scoring 
Congress on integrity and honesty about the rules we have set up, it 
would be a zero. We aren't adhering to our own rules.
  So what I would admonish my colleagues to do is, if they care about 
debt, is to vote for this point of order that says that we should 
adhere to our budget caps and we should really truly care about the 
budget deficit.
  Thank you, Mr. President.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Maine.

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