Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023--Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, our national debt now stands at about $32 trillion.

How did we get here? Whose fault is it? Republicans? Democrats?

Well, the answer is, yes, both parties are at fault for different reasons. Republicans come to this floor and will come to this floor today saying: We need unlimited military spending.

And Democrats will come to this floor and say: We need unlimited welfare spending.

And guess what happens. They compromise. People say Washington doesn't compromise. They compromise all the time. That is what this debt deal that is before us is, a compromise. But the compromise is always to spend more money.

How do we know that? The debt deal that has been crafted by Biden and McCarthy is an unlimited increase in the debt ceiling. Historically, when we raise the debt ceiling, it would be $100 billion or $200 billion or--God forbid--$1 trillion. It was a dollar amount.

This debt ceiling will go up until January 2025. How many dollars will be borrowed? As many as they can possibly shovel out the door. It will be how much money can you shovel out the door until January 2025. That is how much we will spend. Is there a dollar amount? No. How much can you shovel it out and how fast can you shovel it out? There will be no restraint from this debt deal.

There is a pretense. There is a playing around the edges as if, oh, there might be a cut here or there might be a cut there.

There are no cuts. Why? Two-thirds of your spending is entitlement spending. The on-budget entitlement spending is Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and other programs. They are called mandatory, and no one ever looks at them. They go on in perpetuity. This is what drives the deficit.

Who took them off the table? How come there is no discussion of this? Actually, Republicans took them off the table because they feared being criticized by the Democrats.

It is being used in the Presidential campaign: Let's not talk about the entitlements. But that is two-thirds of what gets spent every year. If you don't talk about the entitlements, if you don't talk about mandatory spending, you, frankly, are not a serious person, and you will not make a serious dent in this problem.

So we have taken off the table all mandatory spending--no discussion of it. Does this mean they are in good shape? Is Medicare and Social Security and all these programs in good shape? Heck no, they are not in good shape. They are all running out of money. They are headed toward bankruptcy.

Is anybody brave enough to reform them? No, not a damn thing is going to be done for any of them. But when you take them off the table--take all the entitlement spending off the table and do nothing about it, now we are down to one-third of the budget. So now you are going to try to do budgetary reform, while excluding two-thirds of the spending, on one-third.

But it is worse than that. The one-third they call discretionary spending. It is about $1.6 trillion. Half of that is military. So they took that off the table.

So mandatory spending--entitlements--is going up 5 percent under this deal because that is what it has been doing for years and years. It is going up 5 percent. The military is going up 3 percent.

So what is left? What are we left looking at? We are looking at one- sixth of the budget, somewhere between 15 and 20 percent--a small sliver of the budget. It is called nonmilitary discretionary, and they think we are going to do some type of fiscal reform on that small sliver of government.

Well, guess what. You can't do it. You can eliminate all of the nonmilitary discretionary money. Leave the mandatory in place. Leave the military in place. Increase them. Eliminate all this other chunk of money, and you still never balance the budget.

There was a time when there was a conservative movement, and the conservative movement had a voice in Washington. There is still some voice but not much. But there was a time when people on the conservative side of this said: Well, in order to be a thoughtful, rational, realistic, strong response to the budget deficit, you would have to balance your budget in 5 years. In fact, we voted on a constitutional amendment in this body, and every Republican voted for it. But it said you had to balance in 5 years.

Why 5 years? Well, because most of the plans that lasted longer than that, most of the plans that balanced in years 9 and 10 were basically somebody fudging the numbers and hoping something good would happen in year 9 or 10, but the only years they actually had any power over were the first year or two, and there weren't very many cuts. And they always had unrealistic expectations in year 10.

So what I have done? I said: Let's look at 5 years. What would it take?

So about 5 or 6 years ago, I began introducing something called the penny plan. And what would it do? It would cut one penny out of every dollar. It actually would balance. Actually, the first year I did it, I didn't even cut 1 percent. I froze spending for 5 years, and the budget would have balanced. But the trick is--or not the trick but the truth is that you have to cut all spending or freeze all spending. You can't just freeze a sliver of spending.

So people talked about: Oh, there is a 1-percent trigger on the discretionary spending. That is $16 billion.

They are going to add $4 trillion in debt over the next 2 years, and they say: ``But by golly, we might save $16 billion,'' which even that is not going to happen because the trigger isn't real, doesn't have muscle, and will be evaded.

But the thing is that if we were to balance the budget over 5 years, what would happen is there now needs to be about a 5-percent cut of all the spending each year for 5 years and then the budget would balance.

You say: Well, isn't that just a number? What would that mean to real people? Why do I care whether the budget is balanced?

Well, go to the grocery store, go to buy gas, go to buy anything, go to pay your rent, look at your cost of living and look at what inflation is doing to you.

Who does inflation hurt the worst? Those on fixed incomes and those of the working class because they don't have extra expendable income. Most of their income goes to things that they have to purchase each month.

But where does inflation come from?

The Senator from Indiana described it accurately. We run a debt. This place spends money we don't have, and where is the deficit made up for? We sell that debt to the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve buys it. And it is like: Wow, this is a great system. We spend money we don't have. We print up these things called Treasury bills. The Federal Reserve comes over and buys them. Wow. We can just do anything we want. We have the printing press. But when they create new money and that new money enters into circulation, that is inflation.

Inflation is an increase in the money supply, and when you increase the money supply and you chase the same amount of goods, you are going to chase the prices right up. That is where inflation comes from.

So the debt is not just a number. The debt is about the value of your paycheck. It is about how far your paycheck goes.

So right now we are in a bit of a spiral. We have had 9 percent inflation. It is a little lower now, but we have had as high as 9 percent, and I think the cost of living increase for Social Security went up 9 to match that. But you will actually find people who say: You know, even with the 9-percent increase, I still can't buy everything I need. I am actually still being squeezed.

But it is a bait and switch. It is because your government isn't honest with you. If your government wanted to be honest with you, and they say: We are going to be everything to everyone, and we are going to give you stuff--it is funny because we have this comparison sometimes with Sweden. People say and many Democrats will say: We want to be Sweden. We want to be Sweden, and we are going to give you everything. And we are going to have a big government that coddles you from cradle to grave.

But do you know how they do it in Sweden? With a balanced budget. I am not advocating we become Sweden, but they balance their annual budget every year.

Do you know how they got to have all that free stuff to give everybody, how they have a safety net that includes everything including college, free healthcare, everything? They tax everybody an enormous amount of tax.

Over here the bait and switch is they will say: We are just going to tax the rich people. It is easy. Just tax the rich people.

They don't do that in Sweden, though. In Sweden, they tax everybody. It is a 60-percent income tax beginning at $60,000 a year. Everybody pays. The middle class pays.

So if we wanted to be to honest and we were to say, ``We are going to give you this massive safety net. You don't have to work. Everybody can have a basic income, and do all this,'' we would be honest or we should be honest and say it would take massive taxes.

Instead, there is a dishonesty, but the dishonesty is on both sides of the aisle. The Democrats say that welfare is free and the safety net is free and Social Security is free and all these things are free.

What do the Republicans say? The military industrial complex is free. You can have all the weapons you want. You can give hundreds of billions of dollars of weapons to Ukraine, and it won't cost anything because we will just print it up.

See, there were times in our history when you went through a war or with the devastation of war in World War II, the people actually suffered, and you could see the suffering and people felt like they had to pay something. But now we just put it on the tab.

But there is a point at which the tab gets so large that there can be something precipitous happening. The question has always been, Is this a gradual problem where we will just have to deal with a little inflation, 5 or 10 percent here, or is there a point at which there is a calamity?

If you look at the stock market for the last 100 years, some people will point to 7 different days in which like 80 or 90 percent of the downturn occurred in 7 days in the last century.

Is there a possibility of calamity when we are so destructive to our dollar, when we are so destructive to good sense?

I think the American people want more from us. Recent polls have said 60 percent of Americans say don't raise the debt ceiling without significant reform. Forty-three Republicans--forty-four of us, actually, said: We want significant reforms before we raise the debt ceiling.

But then the devil is in the details. The devil is in concluding what is significant and what is not significant. So what will end up happening--my prediction here--is almost every Democrat will vote to raise the debt ceiling and about half the Republicans will vote. It will be a 75-25 vote, and in the end, the debt ceiling will go up.

The people will say: It is good. We didn't have a calamity. The stock market didn't crash because we didn't pay our debt.

But you might want to ask yourself: Is this really a contrived controversy? Is there really a reason in which we would ever default? Is there a reason why we wouldn't make our interest payment? We bring in $5 trillion, and our interest payment is $500 billion.

So that would be like you make $100,000, and your mortgage payment is $10,000. If you made $100,000 and your mortgage payment is $10,000, is there any chance you would ever default? Is there any reason you wouldn't cut your other expenditures to prioritize your interest so you don't get kicked out of your house? That is what every American family would do, but we don't do it up here.

So we threaten default. We scare the markets and say: Oh, no, we will default if the debt ceiling doesn't come up.

No, we would default only if we refused to cut spending. So we spend a trillion dollars more than comes in every year. That is the problem.

If we simply said: We are going to pay the $500 billion, 10 percent of our revenue for next year. We are going to pay the interest no matter what. And guess what. We will tell the marketplace we are never going to default. We are never going to default. We will always do that. That would be great. The market would go gangbusters and say: We no longer have to worry about those knuckleheads. They finally decided they would pay their interest, and they always will.

Then what would happen?

Well, we wouldn't have enough money for everything. So then we should look at where we can save money.

The problem has always been this. Republicans point at Democrats and say: We don't like your programs. Let's cut your programs.

Democrats look at Republicans and say: No, no, no. Don't cut our programs. Cut yours.

Everybody is ``Don't cut mine, cut yours.''

That is why I have taken the approach and continue to take the approach that we cut everything across the board. In the past, there were always conservatives who said: Let's get rid of Public Television. Let's get rid of ``Sesame Street'' and Big Bird, and they would get so much grief over that. It is like, why do that? You are not balancing the budget over Big Bird. Take 1 percent of Big Bird's budget. Take 1 percent of everybody's budget.

What would that bring about? It would bring about more conservation of the dollar. It would bring about more restraint and more reform.

I will end with this. People ask: Where would you cut? I would say everywhere. But I can give you on the tip of my hand, ridiculous stuff that should have a 100 percent cut, but it is never cut, and it goes on and on. In the early 1970s, William Proxmire, a conservative Democrat, pointed out that the National Science Foundation was spending $50,000 to study what makes people fall in love. Now that is a better, I think, topic for Cosmopolitan magazine than it is for a government study.

Nowadays, it has gone up. We spent a million dollars having young people take selfies of themselves while smiling and then looking at it later in the day to see if looking at pictures of yourself smiling makes you a happier person. That cost you a million bucks.

We spent $1\1/2\ million studying the mating call of the Panamanian frog to see if the mating call of the country frogs is different from the city frogs.

We spent nearly a million dollars studying the Japanese quail to see if they are more sexually promiscuous when they are on cocaine. I think we could have just polled the audience on that one.

This is the kind of ridiculous stuff--but does it get better? I complain about this every year and all the time and everybody shakes their head and says: No way. Why are we doing that? For the National Science Foundation, we increased their budget 50 percent last year. People said: Oh, we have to compete with China. So let's give the National Science Foundation more money.

We almost increased their budget by 50 percent--the people who are studying why you go on dates, why you are happy, what the male frog's mating call is. This is the craziness, but it never gets better because we always spend more money.

So my amendment would do this: My amendment would reduce the spending in real terms. We would actually spend less money next year than last year. It would be a 5-percent reduction in money. You would spend less each year, and, over 5 years, you would balance your budget. Then it would be on course to balance.

People ask: Who can do this?

Half of Europe does it. Sweden balances their budget. Germany balances their budget. Over half of the countries in Europe run on an annual balanced budget.

Our profligacy and our spending are catching up to us. I say we act now. I recommend a ``yes'' vote on my amendment.

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