Providing For Consideration Of Senate Amendment To H.J. Res. 45, Increasing The Statutory Limit On The Public Debt
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. NEUGEBAUER. Madam Speaker, I rise today to express great concern on behalf of our children and our grandchildren who are going to bear the burden of this expansion of our national debt. Today we're going to vote on the sixth increase in the debt limit in the past 2 1/2 years. After today we will have added $4 trillion to the government credit limit. Who's going to pay this bill? Congress must address the root of this debt limit increase. It's the spending.
I want to point to a chart here that the President the other night came and talked to us about his spending freeze. So here is the impact of the freeze on spending. I know it's a little hard to tell, but if you look real closely, you see that you get a 49.27 percent growth in spending without the freeze, but with the freeze you get a 49.01 percent increase in spending.
It's a gimmick. This whole PAYGO thing is a sham. We just had a gentleman in New York that was doing a kind of a sham transaction, and he's probably going to--in fact, he is in prison for a Ponzi scheme. That's what this whole situation is is a Ponzi scheme, because what we're doing is we're borrowing and spending and borrowing and spending; we're borrowing the money to make the interest payments on the debt that we already have. And what do the Democrats want to do? They want to borrow some more money.
If you were serious about spending, I offered two amendments yesterday to the Rules Committee that would have put some caps on spending, would have begun to decelerate the growth of government. Those rules, are they eligible to be considered on this floor today? No, they were denied.
You see, if we keep putting off and playing the Ponzi scheme game, we're going to keep running up the debt for our children and our grandchildren. What does PAYGO really mean, the PAYGO vote that we're going to have? It means the American people get to pay and the Democrats get to go spending, taxing and borrowing, just like they've been doing since they took control of this House 3 years ago. But they want you to think today that they have brought some real reform to this body. We passed PAYGO in 2007. Guess what we've done since we've passed PAYGO? We've raised the debt limit five times. And, in fact, in 1998, of the bills that came across this floor, 98 percent of the time, PAYGO was either waived or exempted from that.
And as the gentleman pointed out a while ago, and I appreciate him doing that, a majority of the text of this bill isn't about how we're going to cut spending; it's about the things that we're going to waive that aren't going to be subject to PAYGO. So if we're serious about cutting spending in this country because we're serious about this debt, then why aren't we taking steps that really are going to address spending? The reason that they don't want to address spending is they don't intend to cut spending. They intend to raise taxes. I encourage my colleagues to vote against the rule.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source