Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2008

Floor Speech

DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR, ENVIRONMENT, AND RELATED AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2008 -- (House of Representatives - June 27, 2007)

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Mr. CAMPBELL of California. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from Georgia for yielding.

As I listened to the arguments, what arguments that are presented, from the majority Democrats, I hear some things that don't quite ring true. They talk a lot about their pay-as-you-go rules and that their great fiscal accomplishment of this Congress is that they are going to pay for spending as you go. Yet this bill increases spending by $1.2 billion, and it is not paid for. There is no $1.2 billion cut somewhere else. They are simply going to increase the deficit by $1.2 billion more because they have decided they want to spend it.

They say that they are not raising taxes. But yet their budget increases spending every single year for 5 years and then miraculously says they are going to balance the budget. How do they do that? Because they did have in their budget the largest tax increase in American history.

You just heard them recently just decry the former deficits. Oh, my gosh, Republicans drove up these deficits. And, in fact, we did. And we agree that that was not the right thing to do. So what is their response? Make the deficits bigger. Take the spending that we had while we were in charge and increase it by more.

And then they have one other thing they continue to do which is to call something like this bill a ``cut.'' You heard the gentleman from Washington on the last proposal say that it was a devastating cut, when in fact all this does, as the gentleman from Georgia pointed out, is take what's already a 4.5 percent increase and reduce it.

Now, what I want to do is, since they're having a hard time understanding this, I want to put this up graphically so that maybe they will understand better.

Now, Mr. Chairman, here are 100 donkeys. I figured that donkeys were something that Democrats would be able to relate to. So we have 100 donkeys here. Imagine that this is 100 donkeys of spending. Here's what this bill will do. There, Mr. Chairman, are 99 donkeys; 100 donkeys here, 99 donkeys there. Probably having a hard time, I would imagine, Mr. Chairman, people in the gallery are probably having a hard time telling the difference. That's because there isn't much difference. That's because it isn't a big cut, it isn't a big reduction. If you have a million-dollar program, all we're asking is for that program to get by on $90,000. If it's $100 million, we're asking them to get by on a mere $99 million. If it's a billion-dollar program, do you think that some government agencies can squeak by on $990 million rather than a billion?

But here's the big point: It doesn't look like a lot of difference in donkeys, but if we do that, if we spend the 99 instead of 100 on every single government program, we save $30 billion. That is real money. And this is how you save it: a little bit at a time. Ask a million-dollar program to get by on $990,000, ask a billion-dollar program to get by on 1 percent less. And when you do that with every single program in government, you save $30 billion a year. That, Mr. Chairman, is how we can get to a balanced budget without not only the largest tax increase in American history, without raising taxes on the hardworking people in America at all simply by asking government day by day, get by on 1 percent less. I think we can do it. I think we should vote for this amendment.

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Mr. CAMPBELL of California. I thank the gentlelady from Colorado.

You know, we have heard a lot today from the majority party whenever we talk about this amendment, this bill, this spending, they want to bring up last year's bills, last year's spending. We acknowledge, last year's spending was too much. Last year's bills were too much. That's not what we're talking about. It's like the baseball team wanting to play last year's season again. Look what we did last year. Look what happened last year. No, we're in the middle of this year. We're in the middle of this season. It doesn't matter who won the World Series last year. It matters who's in first place this year. What matters is this year. How much are we going to spend this year? That's what we're voting on. How much are we going to increase the deficit this year? How much further are we going to raid the Social Security surplus this year? That's the question before us. And we think we ought to have the deficit increase a little less and that we should raid the Social Security surplus a little less and that we shouldn't set up a situation where you're going to raise taxes on all of the American people.

The previous amendment, I showed a couple of charts. The previous amendment was to reduce spending by 1 percent. I tried to point out to the majority that it's like this. Here are 100 donkeys, something they can understand. If we reduce that by 1 percent, we have 99 donkeys. Not that big a difference in donkeys. And so we proposed an amendment last time, which the majority party defeated on voice vote, will undoubtedly defeat later, that said, let's just get by on 99 donkeys, money, instead of 100 donkeys, money. Well, they said they couldn't do it.

So the gentlelady from Colorado offers an alternative, which is get by on 99 1/2 donkeys. If I had a half donkey, I would stick it up there. You can pick whichever end of the donkey you want, but put another half a donkey on that chart. And so we're saying rather than 100 donkeys, get by with 99 1/2 . It's just saying if you have a million-dollar program, we said, well, get by on 999,000. They're saying, no. Okay. How about $999,500? If you have a $100 million program, we're saying can you get by on $99 million. They said, no. We're saying, okay, how about $99 1/2 million.

That's what this argument is about. Just asking for a half a percent, each government agency, each government program to deal with a half a percent less. People at home make these kinds of decisions with way bigger percentages than that all the time, Mr. Chairman. And if we do it, if we reduce it by 1 percent, we would save $30 billion if we did every program every year. If it's a half a percent, it's still $15 billion. That is real money, Mr. Chairman. Real money no matter how you cut it. And that is the way we can balance this budget without raising taxes.

There, Mr. Chairman, is the big difference between the majority Democratic Party and the Republican Party. We're saying, get by on 99 donkeys or 99 1/2 donkeys instead of 100. Tell government bureaucrats that we can balance this budget without raising taxes. They, however, want to give the bureaucrats 100 donkeys of spending every time and raise taxes on the American people to make up the difference. That's what we're talking about here. That's the difference in this debate. That's the difference between these parties.

Mr. Chairman, I would urge all Members to vote to make government bureaucrats deal with a tiny bit less and let people save and keep their own money.

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