Part B Amendment No. 6 Offered By Mr. Garrett Of New Jersey

Floor Speech

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Mrs. BLACKBURN. Mr. Chairman, tonight I rise in support of the American taxpayer.

Like a lot of my colleagues, I was home last week. I spent a lot of my time talking with constituents and listening to them and to their concerns. And it seems like wherever I went and whomever I spoke with, one concern overrode all of the others. They talked to us a lot about how astounded they were with cap-and-trade and they talked about their fears of what the liberal proposals were going to do to health care.

But the one thing that overrode them all, the commonality of concern, was with spending, the deficit, and national debt. Many times they used the term ``I am dumbfounded'' by what we are spending. Where is this money coming from? Is it coming from China? Is it coming from India? Are we just continuing to roll up the debt? And over and over they said, Tell me what we can do to stop this excessive spending.

Well, Mr. Chairman, my amendment is a good first step, and it is a way that we can begin to slow the Federal spending.

The approps bill before us represents nearly a 12 percent spending increase over last year. And if you add all the stimulus spending, which was $26.5 billion, and the emergency spending, which was $7.9 billion, these programs have benefited from about a 125 percent increase over the past 3 years. So can any of us say that spending 125 percent more than we did on these programs last year in this economic climate is responsible? Look at what that growth has been over a 3-year period of time.

Mr. Chairman, I am asking my colleagues to agree with me to give back just one nickel out of every dollar that is being appropriated and given to the bureaucracy, one nickel out of every single dollar.

As my colleagues all know, I am probably the proudest grandmother here on Capitol Hill. I have two adorable grandsons. My oldest grandson is barely a year old, and he and his brother, his 3-week-old brother, are each already in debt to the tune of about $70,000 to the Federal Government.

I know that there are thousands of grandparents that are out there just like me. They are incredibly concerned about what they see happening. They fear that the exploding debt and the deficit will compromise and will cap the opportunity of those precious children and that we will trade their bright future for one that is limited by a national debt that makes this Nation so sluggish that the best and the brightest opportunities are going to end up going elsewhere. And where are we getting the money? We are getting the money from our grandchildren.

So I urge support of my amendment. Cut 5 percent across the board. Cut a nickel from every dollar. And require today's bureaucracy to find a way to do what the American taxpayer is doing, to tighten the belt and save that nickel out of a dollar for our future.

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Mrs. BLACKBURN. Mr. Chairman, the gentlewoman mentioned fiscal irresponsibility. I think that growing programs by 12 percent when they have already seen enormous, enormous increases is irresponsible.

We are asking to curtail the growth 5 percent. Curtail that growth 5 percent.

You know, the States have been a great lab of experimentation in this. And many States, including mine of Tennessee, have had across-the-board cuts, and they have used that to rein in the bureaucracy and say tighten your belts. Times are tough. Tighten your belts. And, Mr. Chairman, that is what we should do.

Priorities. She talked about priorities. How about the priority of the American taxpayer? How about the priority of the American farmer who writes that check to Uncle Sam every year and turns to his child and says, Guess what, you're not going to go to the university; you're going to go get another job and work another year before you can go.

These are priorities that are set aside while they meet our obligation to us. It is our responsibility to be good stewards of that dollar. And giving egregious raises--listen to this. McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program grants, an increase of 99.5 percent; FDA salaries and expenses--and, trust me, Energy and Commerce, we've been after them for a long time--14.6 percent.

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