Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. Chairman, it was the basic principle that George Washington laid out in his farewell address, that every generation should take care of the responsibilities of that generation, rather than pass it on to their child. It is a 200-year-old concept. It is fairly straightforward.

What is interesting to me is I have been in a personal conversation with our current President of the United States about debt and about balancing the budget. The conversation back and forth was circled around a simple principle: Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, two decades ago, made it their crowning achievement that they balanced the budget in a bipartisan time period.

My request to this President was: Can we agree that we should set a goal to balance the budget? His response to me was: No. Twenty years ago, that was a good idea, but now, the perception is that we should have sustainable deficits, that is, balance everything except for interest.

This year, our interest payment is $233 billion. CBO forecasts that 10 years from now, our interest payment--single-year, one-year interest payment 10 years from now will be $880 billion.

We must get us back to balance, and when I say balance, I mean real balance. Families balance their budget. Businesses balance their budget. States balance their budget.

We see times in our past when we had a balanced budget and saw the economic activity from that; but for whatever reason, now, we are just going to ignore that. Why? First off, it is because they will say it is hard. It is difficult to balance our budget. Well, I am sorry that it is hard.

This is what leaders do. We make difficult decisions to be able to get our Nation back on track for now and for the future.

The second thing is let's do a balanced approach. Let's raise taxes if we are going to reduce spending. Right now, this year, we have the highest amount of revenue in the history of the United States coming into the Federal Treasury.

Even with a down economy, this is the highest amount of revenue that has ever come into the Treasury, the second highest amount that has ever come into the Treasury, last year.

This is not an issue about not having enough tax revenue. We have the highest amount we have ever come into the Treasury. The issue is we are overspending. That is the key issue that we have got to get into.

The other argument that comes out is, you know what, there are no more efficiencies left. There is nowhere else left to cut in the Federal Government. Well, I have difficulty finding anyone outside of Washington that believes this government is running so efficient; there is no fraud, there is no waste, there are no inefficiencies in government, there is nowhere to cut.

When you walk through our budget, we are not trying to damage our economy. We are trying to protect our economy. We are trying to help grow and establish jobs that are happening by stabilizing the economy.

You go to businesspeople all over the country. They ask for one simple thing: give us a stable plan that gets us back onto balance, give us some stability in our economy, and we will grow our business.

Some predictability, that is what this budget is headed towards. It also is dealing with some simple things, like national defense. National defense is a prime--prime task of the Federal Government. This budget aggressively steps up and says we have a responsibility for national defense. We should maintain that.

The conversation about going to 10 carrier units around the world, 10 aircraft carriers may sound like a lot until you realize only two of them are in the ocean at any given time when you get down to 10.

When we get back up to 11, which is the established amount that we want to have, we can now have three out in our oceans. When you drop down that amount, you are making a decision that we are not going to have a presence somewhere in the ocean.

We have a stable peace when we are strong. It is a basic principle. If we weaken our military presence, we expose ourselves to weakness.

We need to be able to do this. We need to take out ObamaCare. We need to get us back into a stable economy. We need to deal with national defense. That is what this budget is all about.

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