Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2014

Floor Speech

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Mr. CAMPBELL. I thank the gentleman from South Carolina.

Sometimes, Mr. Chairman, you live in a neighborhood. You look down the street, and there's a neighbor there. They've got new cars, and they're remodeling the kitchen, and they take a lot of expensive vacations. You look down the street, and you wonder: How are they doing that? They live on the same street that we live on. How are they doing all that stuff? And you're tempted. You sit there and think, well, why don't we get some new cars, and why don't we redo the kitchen and take some longer, nicer, more expensive trips. Then, one day, the sticker goes up on the window of that house that says that they have to leave. The moving van comes up, and the house is foreclosed upon--the cars go away; they can't use the kitchen anymore; they're not taking any more trips. Then you realize you made the right decision.

It was a mirage. It looked like they could pay for all that, but they couldn't. This is an allegory for what's going on now.

The United States has neighbors in the world--Greece, Spain, Cyprus, Japan--and they have those stickers going up, those foreclosure things going up, because they can't pay for what they're doing. The Senate budget that's before us follows that same path--a mirage of having a lot of what seems to be great things, but you can't pay for them, and eventually that eviction and that foreclosure will come.

We cannot do that. We cannot foreclose on Medicare. We cannot foreclose on the things that we provide for people. We cannot foreclose on the job engine that is this country. And we don't foreclose on it by having a balanced approach, which means balancing the budget, which means bringing the budget into balance, into line, so that those stickers don't go up on this house we call the United States of America.

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