Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I and a number of colleagues wish to address this body and the American people this evening on our country's fiscal situation and the decisions facing Congress as we propose a budget for the 2004 fiscal year. We speak with some urgency, and I think colleagues will sense that, because our situation has worsened drastically, and we are convinced that the President's 2004 budget would move our country dramatically in the wrong direction. In the minutes to follow, we will elaborate on our concerns and explain on the alternative course that we should be taking.

Mr. Speaker, just 3 years ago, the Federal budget achieved its first surplus that did not rely on either the Social Security trust fund surplus or the Medicare surplus in many, many years. In fact, in the last years of the Clinton administration, we actually paid down $400 billion of the publicly held debt. This first chart tells the story: the deepening deficits in the 1980s, the climb out of deficit spending that occurred after the historic 1993 budget vote, and then, in the last years of the Clinton administration, a surplus, almost unheard of in this postwar period. This surplus enabled us to pay down a portion of the publicly held debt and to look forward to being able to meet the obligations of Social Security and Medicare as the baby boomers retire.

This situation, unfortunately, has now drastically reversed. As this chart indicates, we have in this second Bush administration a plunge into deficit spending that breaks the record set in the first Bush administration and promises red ink as far as the eye can see. After just 2 years in office, the Bush administration would spend the entire Medicare surplus, the entire Social Security surplus, and would pile up trillions in the debt we once set out to retire. Never in our country's history have we had a fiscal reversal of this magnitude. The next charts will make that especially clear.

We had, at the start of this administration, a projected $5.6 trillion surplus over the next 10 years. That surplus now is not only gone--and you see here the successive projections as our fiscal situation worsened. Now we are looking at no surplus and, in fact, at a $2.1 trillion deficit for that same 10-year period. That is a fiscal reversal of almost $8 trillion, unprecedented in our country's history. The deficit for 2003 is projected to be over $300 billion and for 2004 around $307 billion. The next chart shows those same figures with the Social Security and Medicare surpluses removed. Of course, that makes the situation even more alarming, because when you remove the cushion of the Social Security and Medicare surpluses which the Bush budgets would spend in their entirety over the next 10 years, the hole is even deeper. Where we were formerly looking at a $3 trillion on-budget surplus over the next 10 years, we are now looking at a $4.4 trillion deficit.

This chart indicates what happens to trust fund revenues. The red bars are the Social Security surplus. The yellow bars are the Medicare surplus. The olive bars are the deficit beyond these surpluses. The Bush budget plans to spend those surpluses entirely and to borrow considerably beyond that. All this is going to add to the national debt. We are going to add some $2 trillion to the national debt in the next 5 years.

Some Members will recall that at the end of the Clinton administration, we were talking about actually retiring the publicly held debt by 2008. There was even some debate about whether we could fully pay it down. Well, you can forget about that debate, because now we have a $5 trillion publicly held debt predicted for 2008. As many speakers have already said this evening, that will not only be a huge burden on future generations but it will also sap our annual budgets, because we are going to have to pay an additional $1.5 trillion in money down the rat hole in interest on that publicly held debt.

This will amount to a debt tax, d-e-b-t tax of more than $200 billion a year for the forseeable future. That comes to about $4,500 per year for the average family, and it is rising. This chart indicates how that debt tax, the accumulated debt taxes, will grow by $1.5 trillion by virtue of these projected Federal deficits and the piling up of debt.

Unfortunately, in the face of the worst fiscal reversal in the Nation's history, what is the response of the Bush administration? The response is actually to propose more of the same failed policies. The budget proposes $1.5 trillion in new tax cuts, every penny of which is funded by increased government debt, and when we add the interest costs, those new tax proposals, on top of the old ones, come to almost $2 trillion. These tax cuts mainly benefit the wealthiest taxpayers in this country. They will not only increase the deficit, but they will restrict the money available for education, for the environment, and for transportation, health care, and law enforcement.

In fact, Mr. Speaker, this Bush budget gives us the worst of both worlds. It take us over the cliff fiscally, but then it actually underfunds critical domestic priorities.

We know, for example, that our States are flat on their back fiscally. Our next speaker will elaborate on that.

The No Child Left Behind Act passed with great bipartisan enthusiasm. But it is not funded in the President's budget proposal, leaving the states to their own devices. Homeland Security has been underfunded in the 2003 budget. The President promised $3.5 billion in additional funding for first responders, but then taking the money away from conventional law enforcement grants, leaving the states with less than a billion dollars in new money.

The most obvious way to help the States from the federal level would be to increase the cost sharing percentage temporarily on Medicaid. But just this week the President reiterated that he has no intention of doing that. So the States can forget it when it comes to any relief from their fiscal distress. We may be faced with a situation of cutting taxes here at the Federal level and

having like amounts reimposed by the States to meet their obligations, and that of course would mean that the net stimulative effect was zero.

So, Mr. Speaker, by proposing a budget that mandates enormous deficits into the indefinite future while cutting important domestic priorities, this administration utterly fails to meet the fiscal challenges facing our Nation, and I and my colleagues participating in this special order wish to elaborate on where the Bush budget would take us.

First we will hear from a new Member of this body who has significant experience in politics and in government and is already making his mark, the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Emanuel).

Mr. Speaker, I especially appreciate the gentleman's pointing out the plight of the States and the tongue-in- cheek advice to how the States might improve their situation. Of course we had the Governors here in Washington this week, the Governors from both parties. Is there any indication they got any satisfaction at all from the President?

Mr. Speaker, I ask the gentleman, is it not true that a number of the items under discussion were things that the Federal Government has mandated?

Mr. Speaker, for example, the education reforms under No Child Left Behind.

Mr. Speaker, of course there has been a good deal of help promised in the homeland security area, particularly for upfitting and getting better equipment, better communications capacity for first responders, for fire and emergency medical and police. The Republican Governors went to the White House and apparently came away empty-handed. It seemed even they had a hard time putting a good face on this.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman.

Now I am happy to recognize the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Scott), a Member who has long studied Federal budgets and understands very well the dire situation that we are facing.

If the gentleman will yield, the debt tax was on the way down because the interest payments on the national debt naturally go down as the debt itself is paid off. We had begun paying the debt off. But as that chart seems to indicate, those are on the way right back up, over $200 billion a year in money that I think all of us could think of more productive ways to spend than paying interest on the debt.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for a very convincing demonstration of where we have been and where, unfortunately, it appears we are going, unless we take corrective action.

The gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Van Hollen) is one of our new Members, who is already actively participating in the work of this body. We are happy to have him as part of this Special Order here tonight.

I yield to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Van Hollen).

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the recollection of the President's quote about not passing along problems to future generations. We had a little more candid quote from the director of OMB the other day, Mr. Daniels, who said, ``We have returned to an era of deficits, but we ought not hyperventilate about this issue.''

Well, I do not see anybody hyperventilating here tonight, but what I have heard tonight from the gentleman from Maryland is a passionate and persuasive case for confronting this budget issue and getting our fiscal house in order, getting back on the right track, so I appreciate very much his contribution to our discussion.

I am happy to yield to the gentlewoman from Santa Barbara, California (Mrs. Capps), a treasured colleague, for her remarks on this situation that we are facing.

Mr. Speaker, there is no Member better qualified than the gentlewoman from California to speak to the nursing shortage and to the deficiencies in this budget with respect to nursing education. So she has done all of us a service in pointing this out, and we appreciate very much her contribution.

It is now my pleasure to yield to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Moran), a member of the Committee on Appropriations and the Committee on the Budget.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Virginia for a very useful look at a number of critical items in the President's 2004 budget.

I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Tierney), our esteemed colleague.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield to my colleague, the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Etheridge), who served as our superintendent for instruction and therefore knows our education budget very, very well, but also has been a very strong spokesman in this body for fiscal responsibility.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his contribution with respect to Impact Aid, a subject we have heard about tonight. That certainly is a deficiency in the President's budget.

I am happy to yield the remainder of our time to the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt), the chairman of our Committee on the Budget, for whom I am substituting tonight. He has been tied up in a meeting. We are glad to have him here on the floor to wrap up this Special Order with his own insights.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for contributing to the Special Order.

Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for calling this Special Order today and for his and the gentleman from Utah's (Mr. Matheson) efforts to make certain colleagues have an opportunity to pay tribute to our dear friend Wayne Owens.

Madam Speaker, Wayne Owens bade the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Davis) and me farewell on December 17th after we had traveled through the Middle East together for 7 intense days. He planned to take that same flight the next evening. But the next day Wayne suffered a massive heart attack, collapsed and died while walking on the beach in Tel Aviv.

Our shock and consternation upon hearing the news a mere 24 hours after he had put us on that flight were acute, but these emotions were widely shared among Wayne's many friends, the Utah constituents he served during two distinguished stints in the United States House of Representatives, and the admirers of his path-breaking work since 1989 with the Center for Middle East Peace and Economic Cooperation.

Wayne's background included 6 years of service for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, including work as a missionary in France. In Washington, he served on the staffs of Senators Frank Moss, Robert Kennedy, and Edward Kennedy. He gave up his House seat for an unsuccessful Senate race in 1974 and then returned to the House in the class of 1986, where I and others in that class came to know him as an accomplished and supportive colleague.

He left for another Senate run in 1992 but in the meantime had found his true calling in his work in the Middle East. This was hardly a predictable path in terms of his personal and professional background, but it was one to which he was drawn by his experience on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, his friendship with Daniel Abraham, with whom he organized the Center for Middle East Peace in 1989, and by his vision of what a small, independent and creative organization might achieve in this political and policy thicket.

Wayne, Danny Abraham, and the various Middle East hands and political leaders working with the Center were actively involved in the discussions leading to the Madrid and Oslo agreements, and they found numerous ways of encouraging the Israeli-Syrian and Israeli-Palestinian negotiations of the 1990s. Wayne was haunted by the knowledge of how close to resolution those efforts had come only to collapse into distrust and violence. He had few illusions about the obstacles to getting peace negotiations back on track. Still he persevered, always looking for the openings, the confluences of interest, the glimmers of hope that could be acted and built upon. He was one of the most determined and dedicated persons I have ever known.

Wayne's approach was mirrored in the trip we took in December. We met with the heads of state in Syria, Lebanon, and Israel, demonstrating again the remarkable access and the relationships of respect that Wayne and the Center had developed across the political spectrum in Israel, in the Palestinian community, and in most Arab states. But many of our visits were more narrowly targeted to learn about and to encourage promising initiatives that are under way.

For example, we met in Cairo with Chief of Intelligence General Omar Seuliman regarding the next round of cease-fire talks to be brokered by Egypt among Hamas, Fatah, and possibly other groups. We then visited chief Palestinian Authority negotiator Abu Mazen on the day it was determined that he would personally attend this second round.

We met with Palestinian Authority Finance Minister Salam Fayyad regarding financial and budget reform, where there has been enough progress to allow the U.S. to broker the release of a first installment of Palestinian Authority revenues impounded by Israel.

We talked with Sari Nusseibeh, head of Jerusalem Affairs for the PLO, about the back-channel, unofficial peace initiatives undertaken by him and others.

Wayne specialized in discussions of these sorts, which bore witness to his remarkable understanding of the politics of the region and of the many facets of peacemaking, his conviction that fact-finding for himself or others required diverse sources, and his realization that the encouragement offered, the feedback given, the information exchanged, in such off-the-record sessions could be significant.

As a middle-ranking member of this House, I have found such repeated visits, and my work with Wayne and the center generally, invaluable as a source of information and insight and as an avenue for engagement.

Wayne was passionately committed to the security and integrity of Israel and to justice and self-determination for the Palestinians. He understood well the relation between those two and the unlikelihood of forward movement without persistent American engagement.

The achievement of a comprehensive peace among Israel and its neighbors is a compelling cause in its own right, but it is one given additional urgency by the need for regional cooperation and support in combating terrorism and in disarming Iraq.

With Wayne Owens' passing, we have lost one of our country's most determined and resourceful contributors to this cause. It is critically important for those of us who understand the value of his work to find ways to carry it forward.