Reverse the Curse: Restoring Fiscal Responsibility

Floor Speech

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Mr. CLOUD. Madam Speaker, I thank Jodey for putting this together. I have enjoyed sitting with him in many of the meetings that he has called to work on fiscal responsibility, reaching across the aisle to see about having those important conversations, realizing the heavy task ahead of us, but also how important it is that we take it on.

We are $30 trillion in debt. I like how Jodey framed it because $30 trillion is a hard number for us to grasp, but the idea that it is a deferred tax on our kids, it is nothing that we will have to pay, but it is a burden we are passing on to our kids in the name of spending today.

Right now what we see happening in our Nation is families are struggling with inflation, inflation, and inflation. Right now many families are having to make the choice between food and fuel. You have families on a fixed income who suddenly their money doesn't go as far as it went, and they are having to make tough choices, sometimes between medicine and food.

You have others who have saved their whole life, worked their whole life, thinking their money would stretch a certain distance, and suddenly their life savings is not worth what it was.

The Washington solution, of course, has been to spend more money, exacerbate the problem, put more money out there that causes more and more and more inflation. Typically what we see happen from big-spending politicians is they try to get away with selling this idea to the American people that their personal compassion is defined by how much of other people's money we give away.

That is the most absurd notion, the fact that we could spend other people's money and somehow go back to the American people and say, How much do I care about you? It is not our money to spend. Real compassion would be doing the due diligence to make sure that we are not just voting on a bill that has some warm and fuzzy title but that we are doing the due diligence to make sure that it is actually accomplishing the objectives it was set forth to do.

When we start a program or we start an agency, we come back and we check and we see, are they meeting their benchmarks, are they actually accomplishing it? A lot of times in Congress we will pass a bill out of the best of intentions and find out later on that it is actually doing the opposite of what we intended it to do.

Right now in Washington if you try to get a straight answer on how many programs or agencies exist in Washington, in our Federal bureaucracy, it is hard to get a straight answer, much less to know whether they are doing a good job or not, whether we are being wise with the taxpayer dollar or not.

This is one reason I have authored and introduced here the Federal Sunset Commission Act. We have one in Texas. It has been effective at helping rein in government. It would bring every agency, every program before a commission and review it to see if it is something we should keep doing. Maybe there are a couple programs that are similar that we can consolidate, make them more efficient. Maybe there are some things that are just not accomplishing what they were set out to do. They may have been put out there with the best of intentions, but we need to stop it and give the taxpayer back their taxpayer dollars.

You know, when you study how nations rise and fall throughout history, usually they crumble from within. Right now that is where we are at in the United States. We are not so much in danger of some invading force coming across our borders, but we have not been diligent to spend wisely. We have been irresponsible.

We are the world's reserve currency, but we have not acted like the world's reserve currency. If we are not careful, we will lose that very important standing that has helped us have the freedom and prosperity and, frankly, to be a light, to be a city on a hill, to be a nation that advances freedom and liberty not only here at home but, frankly, across the world.

Some years ago, it was actually under the Bush administration, there was an intelligence report that came out that said basically the greatest transfer in all of history of wealth and power is happening right now from the Western countries to the Eastern countries. They said it was almost inevitable. It was a virtual certainty is the way it was phrased that this transition would happen.

They said it was happening for two reasons. They said it was happening because we are sending oil and gas revenues overseas and we are sending manufacturing overseas. So basically the elites were taking the wealth and hard work of the American worker and sending it to nations that have our not best interests in mind. And they call that good, sound policy.

They said it was virtually inevitable. Well, in the last administration, we saw that we could, indeed, bring those oil and gas revenues back. We saw that actually brought peace and security to the world. We saw that we could begin to bring manufacturing back.

If we release the American worker to do their job, to innovate, they can meet the challenges of the supply chain we face now. Let's get government out of the way and let them do their best work.

There is a story in Scripture of a good king Hezekiah, and history will record that he was a good king, but later on in life he made a big mistake. He invited an enemy country to come see the storehouses, to see where the temple treasuries were, to see where all the gold and weapons were stored up. A prophet came to him a couple days later, and he said, guess what, everything that your ancestors have stored up will be taken away one day because of what you just did. And that was a tragic thing to hear. But what was even more tragic was his response when he said: Well, what you are saying is good because at least it will not happen in my lifetime.

We have too many people in this House who when it comes to legislation are willing to sugarcoat, willing to acquiesce, willing to vote on that good and fuzzy bill because they know that the damage will not come in their lifetime, it won't come in their political career.

We have got to do what is right by the American people; do what is right for generations to come; and do what we need to do to save this great bastion of hope and freedom for the world, the United States of America. Thank you for hosting this. God bless you.

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