The Unsustainable Path of Our Budget

Floor Speech

Mr. PEARCE. Mr. Speaker, we are here this morning. Many in the Nation have questions about how we arrived at this point. It's not that complex. Different people across the country elect people to represent their viewpoints. Even across my own State, the viewpoints vary widely. I probably represent five or six different demographics, different economic engines, different needs. We are sent here to make decisions, to make hard decisions.

One of the toughest things that the Nation faces right now is that we are on an unsustainable path in our United States budget. Those are not my words. They are the words of a specialist, the economist that we hired to tell us such things just last week, notating that what we're doing is not sustainable.

The one side, I recognized their viewpoints, that they should provide more for more people. Other viewpoints are that we should live within our means as a Nation, that we cannot continue to borrow from the future to pay for the present.

And so we arrived at this budget negotiation, this way to fund the government, the continuing resolution. What should happen is that we pass 12 different appropriation bills funding the government, one unit at a time, with great insight coming from both points of view, both parties, both sides of the aisle.

About three or four or five of those have been passed out of committee. Some have been sent to the Senate. Those have not been processed, but the House hasn't finished its work. So we were forced into a circumstance caused by both houses, both parties that said, we'll fund the government with a continuing resolution. That is, we will resolve to continue how we spent before. Those are sometimes inadequate, inaccurate reflections of current spending problems, current spending needs. But that's where we were.

Now on the one side, the President said, We want you to just give us the money to spend. Our side said, We will do that, but we want things in return. If we're spending more than the Nation can bring in, if we're spending more than the government has, then we would like to check that spending. We would give attention to the Affordable Care Act, to ObamaCare, that we would choose that in order to relieve the pressure.

The bill is unpaid for. We are printing the money to make government work now. About $1 trillion a year is being printed.

We call it quantitative easing because printing sounds so crass to the American public. So we're quantitative easing $1 trillion a year; and yet we're bringing on another program which is unaffordable and which we do not have the trillion or $2 trillion to spend.

So our side said, initially, we will give you the funding for the government, but on our side, we would like to defund the entire program. That position simply was never responded to by the Senate.

In good faith, we said, okay, we understand your unspoken communication, so we notched down a bit. We will still continue the government funding at the price that you, the President, are asking for. And this time, we'll simply delay the program for 1 year. It's not working. It has problems in many different States. We still aren't certain where the funding comes from.

And, again, the President and the Senate remained silent, not even bothering to show up for work for a couple of days before they sent our first opinion back, simply rejected. The second was sent back.

Last night we were faced with another quandary. We said, we'll notch down one more time. We said, we'll fund the government at the level you're requesting, but we should, on our side, suggest that we would delay the individual mandate.

The President has given many individual exemptions. He's given waivers to companies, to unions. He said to all employers, we're going to delay your input for a year.

Last night the Senate rejected that. That's the reason we're here today.

I call on the Speaker, the President, and Mr. Reid, to gather publicly in front of TV cameras and work the differences out.

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