Debt Management and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. HOYER. Mr. Chair, the gentleman from Texas says he gets asked all the time about the national debt. He can give a very simple answer--because the Congress keeps spending money and not paying for it. That is how you incur debt; you buy things and you don't pay for them. They can be all sorts of things. They can be Social Security, they can be Medicare, they can be battleships, they can be health care, they can be roads, they can be bridges. If you don't pay for them--it shouldn't be any surprise--you incur debt.

Who spends money in the United States of America? The Congress. Under the Constitution, we are the ones who spend money. I say to my friend from Texas, he might also say, Well, when you create $800 billion-plus of new debt by cutting taxes and not paying for them, you have less revenue, but you don't cut buying stuff, you have more debt. $800-plus billion in December. I didn't vote for that bill because we didn't pay for it.

Now, I have been in office a long time. It is easy and takes no courage to cut taxes, no courage whatsoever. What takes courage is buying things--and if people want them--saying, we need to pay for them. We need to pay for them so our children don't pay for them, so our grandchildren don't pay for them because, guess what, they are going to have their challenges in their time, national security challenges, natural disasters like Katrina or Sandy challenges, Ebola, AIDS, health crises. They are going to have to have resources, and we are spending them.

I have been here sometime, longer I think than the gentleman from Texas, longer than my friend from New Jersey. There is one person in America who can stop spending in its tracks. I have been here 36 years. No President in the 36 years that I have served has had a veto overridden of a bill that spent too much money. Not one. Not one Republican President, not one Democratic President. So a President can stop spending in its tracks.

Under Ronald Reagan, we increased the national debt 189 percent. It was less than a trillion dollars when I came to the Congress of the United States. It was increased under Ronald Reagan 189 percent, the largest of any President.

Under George Bush, in 4 years, it was increased 55 percent; under Bill Clinton, in 8 years, 36 percent. But guess what, during the last 4 years, we had a balanced budget, the only time in the lifetime of anybody in this body that we have had 4 years of balanced budgets.

Now, my Republican friends will say, well, we were in charge of the Congress. For the last 6 years you were. But you were in charge of the House, the Senate, and the Presidency under George W. Bush, and the budget deficit was increased 87 percent.

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Mr. HOYER. Mr. Chair, the President says he is going to veto this bill, but the irony is--and the chairman sits on the floor--the Director of the Office of Management and Budget has submitted a budget on behalf of the administration to respond exactly to the questions that this bill wants to ask.

For the first time in 41 years, the administration has been refused the opportunity to testify, which The Washington Post called, gratuitously, contemptuous. And then my friends have the audacity to bring a bill on the floor in the same week and ask the Secretary of the Treasury to come down and testify, talk about the debt when we know darn well why the debt is what it is.

It is our responsibility, because we incur it, to make sure that we pay our debt. That is our moral responsibility, as well as our constitutional responsibility. This is politics at its most contemptuous level. It is to pretend that somehow the President is responsible.

My friends, we ought to reject this bill not because of the bill itself, but we get this information, as has been so often said. We already get this information. You don't need the Secretary of the Treasury to come down here and give it to us. He testifies before the Committee on Ways and Means; he testifies before other committees.

Let's reject this bill because it is phony, not because substantively we don't need this information. We have it. It is redundant. It does what my friends on the Republican side so often say, we ought to not have redundant things.

Mr. Chair, I appreciate the fact that my time has expired. This bill ought to expire with it.

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