Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2014

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCLINTOCK. I thank the gentleman for yielding and for his leadership on this issue.

Mr. Chairman, this debate over the budget reflects a great struggle between American families and their government over whether they or the government can best spend the money that they have earned. This budget bends that struggle slowly back in favor of those families by returning to them a little of the freedom to spend more of their own money and make more of their own decisions once again.

The prosperity of American families is directly affected by government spending. Government cannot put a dollar into the economy that it first hasn't taken out of the economy.

It's true we see the government job that's created when government puts that dollar back in. What we don't see as clearly is the job that's destroyed when government first pulls that dollar out. We see those lost jobs as chronic unemployment and a stagnating economy.

Every billion dollars spent in Washington means taking $9 from an average family, either in direct taxes or in tax-driven price increases as businesses pass along their costs to consumers. That means that $1 trillion of new taxes that the Senate has proposed means $9,000 per family. Now we're told, don't worry, that's all paid by businesses. But businesses don't pay business taxes, they only collect them. They pass them on to us as consumers through higher prices, to us as employees through lower wages, or to us as investors through lower earnings, usually on our 401(k)s. A trillion dollars of deficit, as we ran up last year, really means $9,000 of future taxes for every family, robbing our children of their futures.

It's about time we started thinking about these numbers in family-sized terms, because ultimately these numbers have a very real impact on families who are struggling to balance their own budgets, to set their own priorities and to look after their own needs.

Now, these days, we've passed more than one-third of the cost of government on to our children, and we financed the remainder through a tax system in which politicians pick winners and losers through an appallingly unfair and distorted Tax Code.

This budget calls for doing away with these tax distortions that reward some and punish others, distortions that shift capital away from economic expansion and into the service of political interests. This budget calls for flattening and lowering tax rates to assure that no American family pays more than one-quarter of its earnings to the Federal Government.

Those nations that have adopted similar reforms have been rewarded with explosive economic growth. That means fairness for every American taxpayer and an economy unshackled from the burdens and political favoritism of our current system.

In short, freedom works, and it's time that we put it back to work.

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