Reverse the Curse

Floor Speech

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Mr. SMUCKER. Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Arrington for leading this discussion tonight and for his kind comments.

It is interesting, my friend talks about Pennsylvania's budget, and I was proud to serve there and be part of the process.

I thought it was a difficult and a broken process there. We would pass a budget weeks beyond the deadline or sometimes months. There would be vigorous discussions with the Governor on what that budget should look like, but at the end of the day, we did it. My friend is exactly right. We passed a budget where expected revenues matched the appropriations that we put forward.

So it was a little unbelievable to come here and see that we haven't done that in about, at least, 20 years here. We certainly haven't balanced the budget in almost our lifetime here. And so as broken as I thought the process was at the State level, at least at the end of the process we had a product that balanced the budget.

So I want to just express my appreciation and thanks to Mr. Arrington for leading this discussion. I share--as he knows, we have had discussions about this--the deep concerns for the current state of our Nation's finances. We talk about this. We serve on the Ways and Means Committee together, and I think Ways and Means Committee members understand the problems we are faced with if we don't address this.

I also serve on the Budget Committee, and there we talk about the problems that we are faced with. But this has to extend beyond just those two committees. It has to extend to our conference and also to this entire body and entire system of government.

We need to be talking about how this impacts our constituents, how it impacts people at home, and why they should care about this. Some people maybe don't even understand that issues of Federal debt and deficits even matter.

Sometimes I like to put it in simple terms. Think of our national debt, say, like a balance on a credit card. We all do budgets in our homes and in our businesses. But think about the national debt. We can't even imagine the $30 trillion number which, by the way, is about $245,000 per American. But let's just talk about it as a credit card. Every one of us will have to shoulder this debt at some point, and we are going to have to make sacrifices.

If you have credit card debt in your home, then you have to make sacrifices to pay it down. The higher the balance, the higher the minimum payment, meaning less money at the end of each month for things that you would rather spend on than paying down and making that credit card payment, like healthcare or saving for retirement, whatever it may be.

If you don't pay down the balance--we haven't done that in a long time here--it will affect your credit rating. You will become uncreditworthy. That will result in higher interest rates, and you will face more payments. It is a snowball effect. That credit rating will plummet. Not only will you pay more, but then no one will trust you with a new loan. As you know, Mr. Speaker, the longer you wait to pay down that credit card debt, the more it grows and grows and grows.

We should all care that every dollar the government spends should be spent responsibly. It is the taxpayers' money. The taxpayers earned it. We should be responsible with their dollars. But we certainly haven't seen the Biden administration doing that. Biden's government has accrued $4.8 trillion in new debt since taking office. We now owe over $30 trillion in debt. That is $245,000 per taxpayer. The American Rescue Plan, the inflation act, the student loan forgiveness, and many other misguided policies each drastically increase the role of government in everyday American lives.

Biden's policies over the past year have incentivized people not to work, rewarded those who have accrued college student loan debt on the backs of those who have worked hard to pay off their own debt or totally avoided debt and have weakened America's goal to be a symbol of freedom in the world.

If we are going to defend the American Dream, then we must fix this problem. We must fix actually the broken budget process here in Congress as well, which the gentleman has talked about.

This week we are, once again, going to fund the government on a massive, short-term, continuing resolution loaded with irresponsible spending. Over the past 4 years of Speaker Pelosi's leadership in the House, House Democrats didn't pass a budget resolution by regular order except to push partisan reconciliation bills that have spent trillions of dollars.

I can tell you, Mr. Speaker, as Republicans, we have made a commitment to Americans, our Commitment to America. And certainly all of us in this conference--certainly those of us in the Budget Committee--will ensure that we do the work, we pass a budget on time and through regular order, and we stick to it. Republicans will commit to reducing our spending in order to preserve that American Dream that we think is so important for future generations.

I thank Mr. Arrington for leading this, and I appreciate the opportunity to be a part of it.

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