Providing For Consideration Of Senate Amendment To H.J. Res. 45, Increasing The Statutory Limit On The Public Debt
Floor Speech
Providing For Consideration Of Senate Amendment To H.J. Res. 45, Increasing The Statutory Limit On The Public Debt
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Mr. EDWARDS of Texas. Madam Speaker, getting sailing lessons from the captains of the economic Titanic may be interesting but not very helpful. Let's get serious. Allowing the U.S. Treasury to default on our Nation's debt for the first time in history is not a responsible option. It would devastate our economy, our stock market, and our children's futures. Republicans know it, and Democrats know it. We all know it.
The responsible action is to start getting control of our deficits today, and we can do that by passing the pay-as-you-go law. Pay-as-you-go is a principle that citizens understand and live by every day. It's a principle that helped Congress in the late 1990s turn the largest deficits in American history, created by some of those who have just spoken, into the largest surpluses in American history.
Unfortunately, the Republican House leadership killed the House pay-as-you-go rule that had worked so well. It killed it in 2002. And what happened? The largest surpluses in our history turned into the largest deficits in American history. The Republican-led Congress passed massive unpaid-for tax cuts and the largest expansion of Medicare without paying for a dime of that. Those two actions alone added $6 trillion to our national debt over a period of just one decade, $6 trillion, most of which was borrowed from the Chinese and other foreign governments. It's time to put some discipline back into our Federal budget processes, and that is what pay-as-you-go is all about.
I am proud to have initiated the effort to make this law, this PAYGO, not a temporary law but a permanent law. Had we done that in the 1990s, we wouldn't be facing the terrible deficits that we hear decried today. Pay-as-you-go works for families, pay-as-you-go works for businesses, and then in the 1990s, it worked for the American people in the Federal budget. And when we pass this into law, it will work once again and help us get these intolerable Federal deficits back under control and preserve our children's futures.
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