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Mr. JORDAN of Ohio. I thank the gentleman for yielding and for his continuing efforts to try to bring some fiscal sanity to this town and this place.
Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this so-called Pay-As-You-Go bill. Most Americans, frankly, would label this tax-as-you-go.
Families and businesses across the country are tightening their belts, but this Congress keeps spending like there is no tomorrow, putting our country on a path towards bankruptcy. Now they're trying to get the American people to look the other way with the smokescreen called PAYGO.
Earlier this year, we offered a balanced budget. That's pay-as-you-go. But this bill doesn't balance the budget. For 3 years, we've been offering amendments both in committee and on this floor that would hold the line on spending. That's really pay-as-you-go. But this bill doesn't hold the line on any spending. In fact, this bill is just another facade to allow spending and spending and spending.
Just remember, last week, for the first time in American history, we hit a $1 trillion deficit, and it's slated to go higher as we have a few months left in this fiscal year. Just to reiterate a couple points that the ranking member made in his opening comments.
Last year, with the pay-as-you-go rule that the majority had put in place, we exempted $420 billion worth of legislation from that very rule, and the deficit increased by $1.7 trillion. That's over a thousand percent increase over the current pay-as-you-go policy that the majority has had in place.
We need real pay-as-you-go. Our substitute offered by our ranking member, Mr. Ryan, is the right approach. It has spending caps. It has deficit targets. It takes the right approach to balance our budget. In fact, it's going to have a supermajority requirement, something we need to override the spending limits and caps in the bill. We don't need more of the smokescreens and empty promises that we always see from Washington. What we need is real fiscal responsibility.
Let me just say this. Over the next decade, the debt is slated to reach $23 trillion. Now think about what it takes to pay that off.
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Mr. JORDAN of Ohio. So $23 trillion. To pay that off, you first have to balance the budget, then you have to run a trillion-dollar surplus for 23 years, and that doesn't count the interest which is now approaching a billion dollars a day.
We need to get serious and not have these smokescreens and facades. We need real pay-as-you-go. We need real fiscal responsibility.
One of the things that makes this country great is the idea that parents make sacrifices for their children so they can have a better life than they did, and they in turn become adults and parents and do the same thing for their kids. And it's been that cycle that has allowed the United States to become the greatest Nation in history. When you begin to reverse that process and live for the moment and leave the debt to someone else, that is a real problem. Today we can do the right thing.
Vote this pay-as-you-go legislation down and enact the substitute version offered by Mr. Ryan. If we do that, we can start to move in the right direction and do what's right for our children and grandchildren.
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