Accomplishments of the House of Representatives

ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

Mr. CONAWAY. I thank the gentlewoman for the opportunity to talk tonight. I thank her for hosting this time and my other colleagues who have spoken.

Let me set the framework for why it is important that we are doing what we are doing. I have six grandchildren and a seventh one on the way. And you look at a CBO study, a Congressional Budget Office study, you look at an Office of Management and Budget study, you look at the GAO, Government Accountability Office study, every single one of those studies shows a pretty frightening picture for the next 50 years.

My oldest grandson will be, in 2050, 45 years from now, he will be where we are. It will be his responsibility and his world to live, kind of where we are right now. And if you believe these three sets of estimates, which they are very credible, it would show that left unchecked this Federal Government will consume half the gross domestic product of this country.

There has never been a free market enterprise anywhere in history where the central government can take half and you and I can take the other half and continue to prosper, continue to grow, continue to have a standard of living that grows with the other half. It just does not work.

We are currently at about 20 percent of GDP, and in my way of thinking, that is the gag threshold. We are about where we can be and still maintain healthy opportunities for the rest of the world. I want those opportunities for my grandchildren. It is incumbent upon us. We received those from our parents and grandparents, and I think to do anything less is particularly unworthy of us.

David Walker who heads up the GAO told us this morning in a meeting that the financial statements of the Federal Government this year will show unfunded liabilities of some $50 trillion. That is a combination of hard debt that gets talked a lot about in this body with Treasury bills and notes and a few bonds that are out there and the debt that is owed to Social Security. But the unfunded promises to Social Security, the unfunded promises to Medicare and Medicaid, the various unfunded responsibilities that we add up, add to constantly in this body, represent about $50 trillion. And that is a staggering amount of money.

We are going to have to hit this on a lot of fronts in order to adjust our way of doing things and to trim this growth in this Federal Government. It is going to require some budgetary reform: things like sunset review process; things like line item veto or enhanced rescission powers for the President. That will be helpful. We also have to address the automatic programs, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. Those programs continue to grow automatically every year unless we do something, take some positive action.

We took a little bit of positive action last year with the Deficit Reduction Act in which we trimmed about $37 billion out of that growth. It was a Herculean effort. If you listen to the rhetoric on both sides, quite frankly we bragged a little bit too much and in contrast the other side screamed and hollered and predicted gloom and doom way too much because that $36 billion if you look at the growth rates and you put it on a line chart, you could barely distinguish the before and after lines on that chart. It was $36 billion, and we bragged about it; but it was a very modest, at best, attempt at doing what we all collectively know that we have got to do, to make some hard choices.

My bill would help us begin to make priority choices for new programs. We do a very terrible job of setting priorities with existing spending. Katrina relief versus food stamps. The war fight versus whatever. We just don't do that very well. Have a hard time saying no. But it seems like we ought to begin to practice saying no or practice setting priorities on new programs. And I appreciate you bragging on that bill.

You mentioned spring cleaning. We are also going to start a thing called Project Dave. Project Dave comes from the movie ``Dave'' in which a surrogate President is brought in because the President has had some sort of stroke of some sort and he is a look alike, somebody who looks exactly like the President. He comes in and he is a rookie. He does not know all the things that you cannot do in the Federal Government. And he begins to kind of grow into his job. He is in a budget meeting or hearing and he brings some commonsense kind of background to the table and begins to whack programs. Of course the bureaucrats, the executive branch folks are saying, you cannot do that. He said, why not? I am the President. So he begins to cut spending all over the place.

So we have got a list, the President has given us a list of about 150 programs that he wants to see cut that have out lived their usefulness. One of them that comes to mind is the job bank that the Labor Department continues to run, an Internet job bank. We spend about $15 million a year on maintaining an Internet job bank.

Anybody who has looked for a job knows that there are huge resources, private sector resources for there for Internet job banks. Why would we continue to run one ourselves?

Let's take that $15 million and leave it with the taxpayers or reduce the deficit. All the kinds of good things that will happen.

I am looking forward to working with the gentlewoman in this spring cleaning that ought to go about helping to shine some spotlights on things that we should not be doing, things that really are not the role of this Federal Government. It is going to be difficult, as I mentioned how hard it was to pass the Deficit Reduction Act, but that is the kind of hard work this Republican group can do.

Let me finish off by saying that I am not a doom and gloom person. The glass is always half full. I drive my staff and family crazy because I am so optimistic. We can fix these problems. These are not beyond us. This is not rocket science. It is straight-up budgeting. If you have a revenue problem and a spending problem causing the deficit, we are fixing the revenue side. It is just fine. It is percolating along just fine.

We simply have a spending problem. We have to begin to say no. So I am very optimistic that this Republican-led House, this Republican-led Senate and a President in the White House that we can make major strides in addressing this very critical issue. That is not an over-statement. This body takes over-statement and hyperbole and puffing to an art form.

I tell people that the single greatest threat that we face to our way of life is not al Qaeda. It is not the terrorists. They will not change our way of life. They may hurt some of us. But we will get them in the end. The single biggest threat to our way of life, to my grandchildren's way of life, is the growth in Federal Government, the growth in spending. That does have the capacity to change our way of life. And it will take some tough decisions on our part to get this done, and we owe it to my grandkids and your grandchildren if you have them to get that work done.

I appreciate being able to pitch in on this tonight.

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