The Financial Condition of Our Nation's Government

THE FINANCIAL CONDITION OF OUR NATION'S GOVERNMENT -- (House of Representatives - May 25, 2005)

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Mr. ISRAEL. Mr. Speaker, I thank my good friend, the gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Ross). The gentleman and I were elected in the same class, in 2000. I thank the gentleman for his leadership for so ably representing the conservative values of his district. I do not agree with every one of his positions, but nobody advocates more fearlessly for the interests of his district than the gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Ross).

Mr. Speaker, I also want to thank the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Davis). I am honored to be on the floor with both of them this evening.

The gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Ross) noted that I am from New York, from Long Island, New York. One of the wisest decisions that I ever made in coming to Congress with the gentleman was to join the Blue Dogs. And,
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in fact, most of the Blue Dogs do come from the South. I am probably the only Blue Dog who speaks with a distinct New York accent. Sometimes we need a translator to figure each other out.

But it really does not matter whether you are from the Deep South or the south shore of Long Island. What binds Blue Dogs are principally two issues: Number one, a sense of fiscal responsibility. We believe that we ought to play by the same rules on the floor of the House that every American family has to play by at their kitchen tables. You have got to balance the books. Those folks do not have the ability to simply print money in their basements. They have got to balance their books. They have got to reconcile their checkbooks. We believe the same.

The second thing that we believe is that we have got to have a strong and robust military, something I agree with passionately.

Now, I have the privilege of serving with the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Cooper) on the Armed Services Committee. There are only two New Yorkers who serve on the Armed Services Committee. I am the only New York Democrat on that committee. And I call myself a Harry Truman Democrat. I believe in a strong and robust defense. I spend most of my time on this floor in this Congress thinking about how to keep our country stronger and safer. And what I want to talk about just for a few minutes this evening is the linkage between this $7 trillion debt and our national security, our national defense, because this figure does not make us stronger in the long run.

Think about what happened on the floor of the House just a few hours ago. We spent the day debating a Defense authorization approaching $500 billion. And at the end of that debate, our Blue Dog colleague, the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Taylor), stood up and suggested that we make a simple, but important, change in the budget that was about to pass. He said to our colleagues on both sides of the aisle, it does not matter whether you are Republican or Democrat; let us do the right thing for our Guard and Reserves. Let us provide them with health care. Let us not tell a single American Guard or Reservist that if you are going to go fight for us in Iraq or Afghanistan, 40 percent of our military in Iraq, Guard and Reserve, if you are going to do that, when you come home we are not going to abandon you, abandon your families with respect to health care. If you need health care, we will take care of it. If you are willing to sacrifice yourself for us, we are willing to take care of your health care, your health insurance, not just while you are fighting, but after.

And what was the response that we heard? It is the same response that we hear time after time after time on the floor of the House. It is not that anybody is against our Guard and Reserve. It is not that anybody is against providing health care for our military. It is just that we cannot afford it because of this number.

Mr. Ross. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Israel. I will be happy to yield to the gentleman.

Mr. Ross. The gentleman is telling us that we, tonight, the majority in this Chamber refused to provide health insurance every day of the week, every week of the month, every month of the year for our men and women who have gone to Iraq, who are going to Iraq, or who have been to Iraq, because they said we could not afford it

Mr. Israel. That is exactly what happened.

Mr. Ross. And it was going to be a billion a year.

Mr. Israel. The gentleman is correct, a billion a year.

Mr. Ross. And this is the same crowd that gave us a budget this year that includes $106 billion in new tax cuts.

Mr. Israel. These are the Members of this body who argue that we can afford to make every single penny of tax cuts permanent, but we cannot afford to provide health care for Members of the National Guard and the Reserve who are fighting for survival around the world.

Mr. Ross. If the gentleman would yield, so what you are telling me is that the majority on the floor of the U.S. House this evening decided it was more important to maintain $106 billion in tax cuts and not provide health insurance year round for our Reservists and Guardsmen that have either been to Iraq, are going to Iraq, or just got back from Iraq or are in Iraq today. They were not willing to take $106 billion in tax cuts and make it $105 billion so they could take care of our men and women in uniform?

Mr. Israel. If the gentleman would yield, the gentleman is precisely correct. That is the decision that was made tonight. But it gets worse, because many of us on the Armed Services Committee approached our colleagues and said, you know, if somebody is willing to go to Iraq and they lose their life, we ought to be able to take care of their life insurance. We ought to pay for their life insurance.

The answer was, great idea, we cannot afford it. After all, we have a $7 trillion debt. Nobody ever says, we do not care about our troops; nobody ever says, we do not care about our military.

It all comes down to this: We used to have a $5.6 trillion surplus. Maybe in those days we could support our military and our military families, but now we have got into deep debt. We have got to make tough decisions so we can improve life insurance for our troops, our military families. We can pay a very modest amount in health care for our Guard and Reserve because of this debt, but also because we want to make sure we can make those tax cuts permanent. Now, that is fundamentally unfair. That is just bad priority.

Meanwhile, as we are telling our Guard and Reserves that we cannot afford their health care, which does not make us stronger, for 2 years, as we told military families that we could not take care of their life insurance, increase their life insurance, increase the death gratuity.

Meanwhile, we continue to engage in reckless fiscal policies with the enemies that we are told that we will have in the future, namely, the Chinese. Every time you have a briefing they tell you, you have to start worrying about China, but meanwhile we are allowing them to finance our debts.

So the adversaries that we are told we should worry about in the next few years are keeping the lights on in the House of Representatives, are running our Humvees in Iraq. How can you have a coherent national security policy when you have to rely on the adversaries that you expect to finance your Treasury, when they own 40 percent of your debt? It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

The final point I want to make is this: This is bad enough. The decisions that are made on the floor of the House with respect to our military are bad enough, but think about what our children are going to have to deal with when they are here on the floor of the House, when they have to figure out how they are going to pay their taxes, balance their checkbooks.

We have a $2.5 trillion budget right now. In 10 years when my kids are approximately my age or approaching my age, think about what that budget is going to do to them. Their defense budget, the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Cooper) probably knows this, will likely approach $600 billion. Interest on the debt which they have to pay will likely approach $500 billion. And everything else, whatever is left in the budget will be allocated to all of their needs, Social Security, and Medicare, the FBI, education, environmental protection, crime reduction.

That is an intolerable budget that we are inflicting on them.

One of the things that the Blue Dogs emphasize is our fundamental responsibility to be fiscally conservative, but to give our kids a better, safer, stronger world than we have today. What we are doing with these numbers, with these policies is raising our kids' taxes, straining their military, mortgaging them to our potential adversaries.

And I am reminded of the very profound words of one of our distinguished colleagues, another member of the Tennessee delegation, the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Tanner), who last spring said to a gathering of Blue Dogs that no nation in the history of humankind has ever been strong, free and bankrupt.

If nothing else, our obligation in Washington, DC., in the administration, in the House of Representatives, is to put politics aside and agree to make sure that we are strong, free and not bankrupt. And all we have done over the past several years is to strain our military, deny military families the basic, decent conditions they need, the health care they need, the life insurance they need; and end up owing more to the adversaries we are told to worry about more and more every day.

We have an obligation to treat our military families better, to treat our troops better, to treat our kids better. Thank goodness the Blue Dogs take that obligation seriously. I thank the gentleman for giving me this time.

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Mr. ISRAEL. Would the gentleman yield?

Mr. COOPER. I would be delighted to yield to the gentleman from New York.

Mr. ISRAEL. I thank the gentleman for yielding. Does the gentleman recall when the House of Representatives voted on the entire $2.5 trillion budget resolution?

Mr. COOPER. That was some 3 weeks ago we had the budget resolution. They rammed it through here in 2 hours.

Mr. ISRAEL. And would the gentleman state how long Members of Congress actually had to read that $2.5 trillion budget?

Mr. COOPER. The gentleman asks an interesting question. I am on the Committee on the Budget, and we were only allowed 2 hours from first glance of the document, and this is a complex document, any document would be that spends $2.6 trillion, and 2 hours later, final passage and you never see it again.

That is an outrage to ram through a budget like that. No responsible board of directors in America, no responsible businessman or woman would tolerate that situation, yet it has become commonplace in the U.S. House of Representatives under Republican leadership.

And lest this be viewed as partisan, check again the Cato Institute report. They say that government accountability has suffered terribly under our all-Republican government because there are no checks and balances any more. There is nobody calling them to task, and so we have got to restore fiscal sanity to this Nation.

Another key element of the Blue Dog spending plan is to set aside a real rainy day fund. We know that emergencies and tragedies are going to occur. Let us set aside a little money in advance so that not everything becomes an emergency here.

We spend tens, sometimes hundreds, of billions of dollars a year here because it is a so-called emergency. And some of them are. But in the most recently past emergency supplemental bill of $82 billion, a lot of that was for our troops in Iraq, and we are all for that; but a lot of it was for other stuff that powerful Congressmen and Senators snuck in the bill because they knew they could get away with it.

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Mr. ISRAEL. Mr. Speaker, just one concluding point. This Blue Dog 12-point plan is not radical or inventive. It is what every American family has to abide by every single day. All this plan says is, we will play by the same rules that our businesses are supposed to play by and our families are supposed to play by. I do not know of a single American family that can just decide to go beyond their means and tell their bank, I want to borrow more. We should play by the same rules.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Ross) and the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Cooper) for their stalwart leadership on fiscal responsibility and common sense.

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