Shared Sacrifice in Resolving the Budget Deficit
Floor Speech
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Mr. BARRASSO. We heard the Senator from Georgia talk about the upcoming predictable crisis, and our Nation faces an Olympic crisis right now, and it is a predictable crisis.
Back in 2006, then-Senator Obama called raising the debt ceiling ``a sign of leadership failure.'' So why 5 years later is it now-President Obama who is asking us to raise the debt ceiling, and why is he doing it with no plan on how to pay back the new debt we continue to accumulate?
In his press conference last week, the President called on this party to ``go ahead and make the tough choices.'' When it comes to cutting spending, his allies in Congress refuse to make any choices. The President has attacked this body for not getting a deal done on time. Yet he declined to meet with Republicans about these very issues and about our ideas. According to the White House Press Secretary--the Press Secretary said this was ``not a conversation worthing having.'' Well, he has finally agreed to meet tomorrow with leaders from both parties.
The White House and Congress have a choice: Do we want America to be broke or do we want America to be balanced? Facts are stubborn things, and the numbers do not lie. Our debt is swallowing our economy whole. Every day Washington borrows $4.1 billion more--borrowed over $4.1 billion yesterday, $4.1 billion today, and it will borrow $4.1 billion again tomorrow. That is over $2 million a minute, every minute. In a single day, Washington borrows enough to buy tens of thousands of new homes. In a single hour, Washington borrows enough to buy 2 million barrels of oil. In a single minute, Washington borrows enough to send 53 students a year to the most expensive colleges in America. In a single second, Washington borrows enough to buy two new Ford Mustang cars. Washington did all of that yesterday, and it will do it all today, and it will do it all tomorrow.
Well, of every dollar Washington spends, 41 cents of it is borrowed. Much of it is borrowed from China. Every American child born today, born tomorrow, and born the next day is born with a debt of over $45,000. Next year, of every dollar Washington spends, 68 cents will go for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest on the debt alone.
If those numbers don't sound scary yet, they will. Interest on our debt cost $196 billion last year. It costs nearly $23 million an hour. It costs over $370,000 a minute, every minute. It costs $6,000 a second, every second, interest alone on our debt. In the time it takes to give this speech, as well as my colleague's previous speech and the speech coming up after that, in those 10 minutes, Washington will have spent millions of dollars on interest payments alone.
The President has railed against tax breaks for private jets. He did it in a press conference last week. He mentioned it six times. What he didn't tell you is that every $100 of the huge deficit of this year alone--of every $100, only two cents of that $100 would be dealt with with the tax he proposes and holds out as the No. 1 thing. What about the other $99.98? What the President won't tell you is that the interest on our debt costs enough to buy over 100 private jets every day--for the interest we pay on the debt alone. His party wants to end tax breaks for yachts. Yet the interest on our debt would buy over 50 luxury yachts every hour. Most Americans are feeling severe pain at the pump. Yet Washington could buy nearly 2,000 gallons of gas at current prices every second with the money we spend on interest on our debt.
If we, as a nation, continue down this path, Washington will spend all of what it takes in on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and interest on this colossal debt. Everything else, from defense to education, will be paid for on a budget of borrowed money. So where is the money going to come from? How will we ever pay it back? A lot of it will come from other countries, countries that do not always have America's best interest at heart.
Debt isn't just a disaster for the distant future; our debt is so unsustainable and irresponsible that even our military leaders have condemned it. ADM Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said the biggest threat to our national security is our debt. The debt is the threat. We do not and we should not take the biggest threat to our national security lightly.
The amount of debt we owe right now today is so high that it is hurting our employment at home. Experts continue to tell us that our debt is costing us millions of jobs. Meanwhile, the Weekly Standard reports that every ``stimulus job'' costs over $ 1/4 million. In other words, the White House could have just cut a check of $100,000 for every American who got a job through the stimulus, and taxpayers still would have come out ahead by $427 billion. Spending like this cannot create jobs because by nature it makes it harder for the private sector to grow, and no growth means no jobs. Because of this, it is harder for American families to
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buy gas, groceries, cars, and homes, to pay tuition for their kids to go to college, and it is harder to
create jobs for those kids who will be graduating this year and next year and every year until we get this spending under control.
Everyone seems to claim they understand that the situation is irresponsible and unsustainable. Two years ago, back in February of 2009, the President called experts to the White House. He called them in for what he called a fiscal responsibility summit. In his opening remarks, here is what the President had to say:
Contrary to the prevailing wisdom in Washington these past few years, we cannot simply spend as we please, and defer the consequences to the next budget, the next administration, or the next generation.
Well, I agreed with the President. He was right. So my question to the President is, What have you done about it?
One thing he has done is to call together a debt commission. Late last year, the debt commission released their report on America's fiscal situation, and the findings were sobering. According to the report, they said the problem was real; the solution will be painful; there is no easy way out; everything must be on the table. You know what else they said. They said Washington must lead.
Washington has not led. Instead, the administration has offered nothing but empty promises. As the White House makes promise after promise and speech after speech with no action to back it up, it is clearer than ever that in Washington spoken promises have become broken promises.
This administration's allies in Congress have no plan other than raising taxes. While they claim to have already accepted the idea of cutting trillions of dollars from the budget, I have yet to hear the Democratic leadership endorse any spending cuts. Where is their plan to cut wasteful Washington spending? So far, they have only talked about tax increases that will kill jobs and hurt our economy. Raising taxes will only make matters worse.
The fundamental difference in this fight is more than just practical, it is also philosophical. We can argue over whether raising taxes on this or on that industry will lower the debt or just raise the costs for the American people.
Let me make this very simple. I am not interested in raising taxes to expand and sustain the size and scope of our Federal Government. I want less government, less costly government, and that means I am not interested in ferreting out new ways to tax people or businesses. I am looking for ways to cut spending to shrink the size of government. I want to dramatically reshape government, spend less, do less, and put power back into the private sector. That is how you raise revenue--you slash government, you put people back to work. Washington's persistent push to put our fiscal crisis off until tomorrow is unacceptable and must end now.
So I come to the floor and say, as someone from Wyoming, where we live within our means, where we balance our budget every year, it is time for this body, this Congress, and this President to sign into law a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. That is an amendment which would force Washington to live within its means.
I yield the floor.
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