Requirement in Budget Submission With Respect to the Cost Per Taxpayer of the Deficit

Floor Speech

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Mrs. BLACKBURN. I thank the gentleman for the time.

Mr. Speaker, talking about burning issues, I don't know of anything that is more pressing than dealing with this Nation's debt. You can go back through the pages and look at what Admiral Mullen had to say on July 6, 2010:

The greatest threat to our Nation's security is our Nation's debt.

That is the reason we are here. We are not here for ourselves. We are here for our children and our grandchildren, and making certain that the America that they have, the future that they have, hope and opportunity that they have, is going to be greater than anything that we ever possibly could have imagined for ourselves.

Isn't that what preserving freedom for prosperity is all about? It is about making certain that we hand over freedom in good shape for another generation.

I will tell you, if you are looking at the debt clock, it's a pretty telling story--over $16.5 trillion. And yesterday, the per citizen share of that debt was $52,818. The per taxpayer share was $147,238.

I know there are some in this body who would like to turn the debt clocks off in the hearing rooms. They just want to ignore it, and supposedly it would go away and we wouldn't have to talk about it. We could just pretend that we do not have a spending problem in Washington, D.C.

Mr. Speaker, that is not reality. That is being completely divorced from reality. In order to defeat a problem, you have to admit that there is a problem. There is a problem with spending in Washington. There is a problem with our Nation's debt.

I support the good work that has been done by my friend from Indiana and encourage all to vote for H.R. 668.

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