Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize the accomplishments of two outstanding leaders and dear friends, Grover and Betty Poteet. The service they have provided over the years resonates throughout our community.

Both natives of Spring Hill, Mr. and Mrs. Poteet now live in Trenton, Tennessee. They have three children, Melinda Poteet Goode, Doug Poteet, and Melia Poteet Anderson. They are also the proud grandparents of Garner Goode and Crockett Goode. Together, Grover and Betty earned the 1999-2000 Citizens of the Year Award, presented by the Trenton Elks Lodge.

Grover graduated from Spring Hill High School in 1955 and served in the United States Army from 1955-1957. Grover has contributed so much to his community, including his service as a member of the Gibson County Court from 1974-1994. Grover also showed his compassion for people by serving as a member of the National Guard Equal Opportunity Race Relations Council. He is currently chair of the Gibson County Lake/Water Board Authority and was recently honored with the Trenton Elks Dedicated Service Award for 2002-2003.

Betty graduated from Spring Hill High School in 1957 and began working at the Milan Army Ammunition Plant, a career that lasted 45 years. Betty also served for 15 years as the parade director for the Trenton Teapot Parade, one of the biggest local festivals in Tennessee. Her tireless community work earned her the Tennessee National Guard's Hard Worker of the Year Award for 1994-1995.

The Poteets have always been very active leaders in Tennessee, through heavy involvement in the Democratic Party at the local and state level. Their love for our democratic process helps make West Tennessee a great place to live.

Time and time again, Grover and Betty Poteet have proven their love for our neighbors in Trenton and Gibson County. Their dedication has always been and will continue to be appreciated. Mr. Speaker, please join me in honoring the accomplishments and dedication of two fine leaders and my friends, Grover and Betty Poteet.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me.

Mr. Speaker, I know I sound like Johnny one-note when I get up here talking about the debt and the deficit on everything that seems to come along. But I want to tell the Members this is serious business, what is happening. If Members want to talk about spending, we and this Congress are spending more money now than any Congress in the history of this country. We are spending it every year, beginning next year and into perpetuity, on interest.

The difference between the bill the chairman has and what we tried to do to fix the problem like the Senate did in spending is $3.39 billion additional in spending, because that is what the interest over 10 years is on $80-something billion that is not paid for.

Now, anybody who wants to get into an argument about spending, we are spending ourselves into oblivion. CBO just came out and said that the deficit this year will be $400 billion. They raised it $100 billion in a month. So $400 billion at 4 percent is an additional $16 billion next year just to pay the interest on the operation of this government that has lasted over 200 years.

They sit here and they talk about spending. We are spending this country silly, and they are doing it by borrowing money that we have to pay interest on every year from now on.

Last year we paid or accrued $336 billion in interest, for which nobody gets a job, nobody gets an aircraft carrier, nobody gets health care, nobody gets an education. It is gone. It is payment on past consumption that we either did not have the courage to ask people to pay for, or we did not have the guts to cut the programs that need cutting.

Members want to talk about spending; let us talk about it. Here is $30 billion right now that we can save if Members want to accept what we have done with the motion to recommit.

Mr. Speaker, I wish to affirm my unwavering support for H. Con. Res. 177 and H. Res. 201, which this House of Representatives passed in tribute to the men and women who serve our nation, their families, and those businesses and other community members who have supported them through this difficult time in our nation's history.

The purpose of House Concurrent Resolution 177 is ``recognizing and commending the members of the United States Armed Forces and their leaders, and the allies of the United States and their armed forces, who participated in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom in Iraq and recognizing the continuing dedication of military families and employers and defense civilians and contractors and the countless communities and patriotic organizations that lent their support to the Armed Forces during those operations.''

This body also passed, by a unanimous vote, House Resolution 201, ``expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that our Nation's businesses and business owners should be commended for their support of our troops and their families as they serve our country in many ways, especially in these days of increased engagement of our military in strategic locations around our Nation and around the world.''

Tennessee has long been proud of its military heritage, having been nicknamed the ``Volunteer State'' when thousands of Tennesseans agreed to serve in the War of 1812. There are more than 14,000 men and women serving in the Tennessee National Guard under the leadership of Tennessee Adjutant General Gus Hargett. More than 20,000 additional troops are stationed at Fort Campbell Army Base, which straddles the border between Tennessee and Kentucky. Fort Campbell troops, including the 101st Airborne Screaming Eagles, and Guard members and reservists from our state have served proudly in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom.

I am proud to represent Naval Support Activity Mid-South in Millington, Tennessee. Under the direction of Captain Helen Dunn, this unit is very important to the operations of the United States Navy. Our district in Tennessee also includes the Milan Army Arsenal, whose facilities help manufacture much of the ammunition used by the United States Army. Tennessee has many such military and military-support institutions and is home to more than 500,000 military veterans who have served our nation honorably.

Our troops and their families are to be commended and thanked for the sacrifices they have made to protect our nation. Please join with me, Mr. Speaker, in expressing gratitude for employers who have made sacrifices to allow Guard and Reserve troops to leave their permanent positions to serve our country. We are also appreciative of those civic and community leaders who have come together to support our men and women in uniform and their families at this difficult time in our nation's history. In Tennessee, our communities have come together to show their patriotism and their appreciation for those who are making sacrifices to protect us all.

Mr. Speaker, I ask that you join me in praising the passage of House Concurrent Resolution 177 and House Resolution 201, saluting our troops, their families, our military-support staff, and community leaders who have shown their appreciation to the men and women who are performing their duty to protect our country.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to oppose what I think is a well intentioned but misguided effort here to amend the first amendment, the Bill of Rights.

Every nation on Earth that I know of has a flag. There is only one that has a bill of rights and that is us. And that is the difference here. Every repressive regime I know of throughout history has tried in some form or another to repress the destruction of whatever they have consider symbolic. Again, every nation on Earth has a flag. There is only one that has a bill of rights, and that is us. We are talking about the first amendment.

For Congress to knowingly give to the government the power to prescribe what is permissible protest when that protest does not affect any other freedoms, nor does it physically harm anybody else, but yet give to the government the right to prescribe limits on that I think is wrong. And I just say this, once we breach the Bill of Rights, they then become relevant. Up until now they are not. We breach those, they become relevant, believe you me it will not be long before there will be some on this floor talking about the second amendment and why we need to change that.

So I want all the conservative thinkers in this body and around the country to think about what we are doing. As a symbol, we are going over ground that has not been plowed. Every nation has a flag only. One has a bill of rights, and that is why I think this is a misdirected effort.

Mr. Speaker, I have a parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. Speaker, is it permissible for a Member to impugn the motives of another Member? I think he is out of order because he has impugned the motives of the gentleman from New York (Mr. Rangel) and those of us who want to speak on this issue by his words.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me time.

Mr. Speaker, this is the first time I have ever been accused of exercising bad faith because we were given 30 minutes to talk about this and we actually took it.

I think that one other point ought to be made, and that is that on January 1, 1995, our national debt subject to limit was $4.8 trillion. On January 1, 2004, it will be $7.4 trillion. That is an increase of 54 percent in 8 years. That is not a political argument; that is a fact, a demonstrable, proven fact.

Now, part two of this motion says, to the maximum extent possible, within the scope of the conference. To me, that means what the Blue Dog plan was that was rejected on the floor, because, to the maximum extent possible, the Blue Dog plan does what we have asked. It neither increases the Federal budget deficit, nor does it increase the amount of debt subject to the public limit. So when one wants to say to the maximum extent possible, we can do that. We could do that by adopting the Blue Dog plan.

The other thing I would simply say is this: if we keep going down this road, we are building in such a structural long-term tax increase called interest on the national debt that the young people of this country are going to be unable to have the options and the choices about what kind of government they want when they are our age, because they will be strapped to the gurney with debt and interest that has to be paid on that debt that we are leaving them.

That is not a political argument either. That is a fact. With interest, compound interest, capitalism, whatever you want to call it, interest must be paid before anything else in our system.

So I would just hope that we would actually take a look at what we are doing.

Mr. Speaker, it is not easy to oppose a tax cut if one holds public office. It does not take a lot of courage to vote for a tax cut. That is something that everybody who seeks public office likes to do, and it is no fun to oppose a tax cut. But who in the world do you all think is going to pay for the ships that are in the Persian Gulf tonight? Who is going to pay for veterans' benefits for people who come back with one leg or one arm off? Who is going to pay to educate the children?

We have a $6.4 trillion deficit. You are raising the debt of this country $980 billion. You borrowed every dime for the Persian Gulf War, and nobody wants to pay for anything.

It is not easy to oppose a tax cut. But I will say one thing. It does not take a whole lot of courage to vote for it because you can go home and get patted on the back tonight. But we are digging a hole that is going to haunt this country this terms of future interest payments.

Who is going to pay the bill? All these young people around here, they are the ones that are getting the bill because they are going to pay interest on every dime that is in this bill tonight.

Mr. Speaker, I used to talk about the debt of the Nation and the deficit in terms of what we were doing to our children and grandchildren. I called it a generational mugging on this floor last year. That is still the case. We are still mugging our children and grandchildren with debt that we are unwilling to pay and we are unwilling to stop spending for our own convenience and our own purposes, so that is still true.

But I used to say also that I wanted everybody under the age of 30 to listen to me because they were going to be directly affected by this reckless economic plan that we are engaged in here. Then I moved that up to age 40. Then I had to move it to age 50.

Now with the knowledge that this government borrowed $111 billion in the first quarter of this year alone, I want to speak to every American who is alive and well and paying taxes because what is happening is we are engaged in a long-term structural tax increase on me and you and everybody that lives in this country because we are unwilling to rein in our appetite for tax cuts and more spending.

Just to pay the interest on the first quarter borrowings this year alone will require an additional $4 billion next year. When you go to write a check to the Internal Revenue Service next April 15, you will be paying your part of an additional $4 billion just to finance the interest cost on the borrowings of one quarter this year.

I spoke to the American Hospital Association's convention here in town about 3 weeks ago. Everybody in this country knows the demographics of our population. We are growing older. There are more and more senior citizens as a percentage of our population. And everybody knows what that means to our medical system, Medicare, Medicaid and the rest. I told them, as long as we continue to engage in this economic pattern of borrow and spend, we are just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The iceberg in this economy is the national debt, because it is going to soak up in the form of interest payments to service that debt all of the new money that comes to town.

Last year we had a Federal income, if you want to call it that, of $1.8 trillion. Of that, we paid or accrued interest of $332 billion. We actually wrote checks for about $185 billion. A third of that went to foreigners, because they are the ones that are buying the Treasury auctions of bills, notes and bonds that take place in this town every 2 weeks. This is an unsustainable economic path that this country is following. There is no way, and let me repeat, no way that we can borrow the kinds of moneys that we are borrowing and grow our way out of it.

The reason I say that is because if you do the math, last year, 18 percent of the money that came here went to either pay interest or was accrued to other government trust funds, primarily Social Security. An 18 percent mortgage, as any businessperson knows, is something that cannot be sustained over the long term. There simply is not enough new income, regardless of growth, to take up the slack and to service the debt that we are building. And so I am more concerned about this than I guess I am almost anything save the security of our Nation and the people that live here from the various terrorist groups that we know of around the world, al Qaeda and the rest. But we are building a

long-term structural tax increase under the guise of a short-term tax cut.

Everybody in this country knows there is no free lunch. Every time you hear people say, we are going to cut taxes and that will create jobs, to some degree that is true; but it depends on the kind of tax cut. I do not know if any of my colleagues have heard Warren Buffett; but he wrote an article that was, in my judgment, excellent about the kind of tax cut that the Senate put together this week and the kind that will be discussed in the conference committee. He said basically this: to cut taxes in the way that is fashioned around here and sunsetted in 3 years is ludicrous if one wants to argue that that is stimulative and will create jobs. If we really wanted to do that and we are going to spend money we do not have, rather than a tax cut that benefits primarily people who hold paper that will pay a dividend on, if we really wanted to do that, we would invest in some public work jobs that would do two things: one, additional spending for homeland security on our harbors, on our railroads and on those targets that we think the terrorists are after. That would do two things, create jobs, number one; and, number two, and more importantly perhaps, make our country safer. That would be the way to stimulate the economy if we wanted to go down that road.

But the second thing we ought to do, in my judgment, is realize that when one cuts taxes and has to borrow the money to make up the income lost to the government, we are experiencing short-term gain, but we are putting in place long-term pain. There is no other way to look at it. The interest charges alone next year will approach $350 billion. That is with interest rates low. If interest rates suddenly spiked up and as the government rolled over its debt, we could be paying 4, 5, perhaps even $600 billion a year in interest on past consumption before we ever get a dime available for a world-class military, for health care for the people of this country, for education and investment in human capital.

All of these things directly affect us. When people say deficits do not matter, then you better question what they are saying because they have not factored in the carrying charges on this massive amount of debt that has been created here in the last 24 months. As the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Boyd) said, we have been asked to raise the debt ceiling, the amount of money the government can borrow, by $1.43 trillion in less than 12 months. I do not care what kind of economic theory you subscribe to, supply side or anything else, that is unsustainable. There is no way that this economy can generate that kind of growth in order to service that kind of debt.

I want to thank the gentleman from Indiana for having this Special Order tonight. I do not know what else to say about it, other than I wish the business community would at least pay some attention to what we are saying. There is no businessperson that I know of in this country, certainly they will not be in business long if they do, that would follow this kind of economic plan. Why, then, would you expect those of us who you entrust with the public's business, which is your business, why would you want us to do something that you would not do in your own business? That is exactly what people are asking us to do. It makes absolutely no sense to cut your income with borrowed money, then piling that much debt on and interest will start on it tomorrow. That is why I said, I used to say we are passing it on to our children and our grandchildren. That is still true. But now we are passing it on to ourselves. It is irresponsible. It is reckless.

Just one more thing. The morality issue here of borrowing money for people in my generation to take a tax cut, give the bill to the young men and women in uniform and their families who just fought over in Iraq, when they get home, they get a bill with interest so we could take a tax cut. There is no honor in that kind of behavior. I said that on the floor some weeks ago and I say it again. There is no honor in this House what we are doing. There is no honor in this building in what we are doing to the men and women in uniform. Not since the War of 1812 have noncombatants in this country not been asked by the administration, by the President and the Congress to help pay for a war that others fought for them and in their stead and on their behalf, and that is exactly what is happening here. You can color it any way you want to, but it is what is happening; and there is no honor here in what is going on.

Mr. Speaker, I adopt everything that has been said about the debt of this country. We are going broke, if anybody looks at it, but I want to say one thing here this morning.

This is a sad day. My colleagues can hide a lot of things around theories of job creation and so forth, but there is one thing they cannot hide today, and that is we are borrowing money after we sent young men and women in uniform to die in Iraq. We buried one in west Tennessee last week, and my colleagues cannot deny the fact that what is going on here this morning is shameful.

They are borrowing money to give a tax cut to people like me, to give the bill to the kids that died in Vietnam and Cambodia and everywhere else over there, but today in Iraq and Afghanistan they are doing it. They are borrowing the money and giving them a bill and they have got to pay interest on it. There is no honor in that. No President and no Congress since the war of 1812 has sent people into war and then tried in no way to pay for it, no way, and what they are doing is there is no honor here this morning. This room reeks with the stain of what we are doing.

Mr. Speaker, today I rise to honor the memory of a fine American, a young husband and father from Dresden, Tennessee, who gave his life serving our Nation in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

SPC. Thomas Arthur Foley III, 23, served with the 2nd Battalion of the 44th Air Defense Artillery Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division of the United States Army. On the 14th of April, he and a fellow soldier were killed outside Baghdad.

Tommy leaves behind a wife of a year and a half, Paulette, and a seven-month-old son, Logan, who reside at Fort Campbell Army Base on the Tennessee-Kentucky border. Tommy's stepfather and mother, Brian and Emily Penick Darden, reside in Dresden. His father and stepmother, Thomas and Angela Foley Jr., live in Montgomery, Kansas. He has a sister, Rebecca Barrington of Martin, Tennessee, and two brothers-- David, who lives in Dresden, and Sean, who lives in Kansas.

Tommy's brother David has also been serving in Iraq and was able to return to Tennessee last week to see his brother buried with full military honors in Martin, Tennessee.

Family members and friends say Tommy was a man who loved life. He bravely gave that life to help make this world a better place for his son Logan and indeed for us all.

Mr. Speaker, please join Tommy's friends, family and me as we honor his memory and thank him for his heroic service to our country.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from American Samoa (Mr. Faleomavaega) for yielding me time.

Mr. Speaker, as the National Wildlife Refuge System celebrates its 100th anniversary, recognition for water fowl hunters and the contribution they have collectively and individually made on behalf of the refuge system is in order. Acquisition of lands for the National Wildlife Refuge System is funded in part by sales of the migratory bird hunting and conservation stamp, known wide and far as the duck stamp. Water fowl hunters are required to purchase a duck stamp as part of their hunting license to hunt water fowl on or off any refuge.

Since 1934, the hunting community virtually alone has been funding the duck stamp program, raising more than a half a billion dollars for the refuge system. In fact, 98 percent of the revenue generated from sales of the duck stamp goes directly to acquisition of our national wildlife refuges, some 5 million acres so far, an extraordinary contribution, I think, by any measure.

Currently, the 8th Congressional District of Tennessee is home to seven: Chickasaw, Cross Creeks, Hatchie, Lake Isom, Lower Hatchie, Reelfoot and Tennessee national wildlife refuges.

Beginning back in August of 1934, Federal law mandated that individuals buy a duck stamp for the privilege of hunting migratory water fowl. Some 635,000 hunters paid $1 each for that stamp issued and it was none too soon. For the if the Great Depression was bad on people, it was worse on the ducks. Their prairie pot holes, ponds, marshes, and wetlands dried up and blew away along with much of the Midwest. Revenues from the duck stamp program were used to purchase and restore submarginal land for wildlife, particularly migratory water fowl.

Today, the cost of a duck stamp is $15, but duck populations are stable and growing. So the next time you are at a National Wildlife Refuge and see a flight of ducks sweeping across the sky, remember to thank a hunter.

Mr. Speaker, it is almost midnight here on the east coast, and I hope that whoever is up and watching will understand what I am about to say.

What we are witnessing here tonight is the largest, long-term, structural tax increase on the American people in the history of this Republic because every year we borrow money, we have to pay interest on it, a tax on the American people, the Blue Dogs call the debt tax, that cannot be repealed.

Mr. Speaker, you have heard under their budget resolution, if it works like they say, we are going to incur $1.2 trillion in additional debt in the next 12 months, in addition to what we have already done and seen the last eight. Mr. Speaker, at 4 percent interest that is $40 billion a year that the American taxpayers have to pay every year.

This is the largest, long-term structural tax increase in the history of this Republic, and nobody can doubt that. At 5 percent, it is over $50 billion a year in perpetuity.

If that is not bad enough, Mr. Speaker, what really is happening here is we have sent young men and women from this Nation to die for other people in the Middle East; and Mr. Speaker, what we are doing is saying we are going to take a tax cut while they go over there and die, and we are going to send the bill for this war and we are borrowing the money to fund and borrowing the money for the tax cut, we are going to send the bill to these young men and women in uniform, the only people who are being asked to sacrifice anything at all in this war, send it to them and their children; some of whom do not have a daddy now because they are dead in Iraq.

Mr. Speaker, where is the honor? Where is the sacrifice? Where is the honor of this House when we try to do something like this? That is exactly what is going on tonight.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to commend the thousands of men and women who serve in the Tennessee National Guard, many of whom have dutifully answered the call to serve our country in this time of war.

In Tennessee, we have always been proud of our strong volunteer spirit, made famous when volunteers from Tennessee traveled with Davy Crockett in 1836 to defend the Alamo in Texas' fight for independence. Today, the volunteer spirit is still alive, and one fine example is in the more than 14,000 men and women who serve in the Tennessee Army National Guard and Tennessee Air National Guard, under the leadership of Tennessee Adjutant General Gus Hargett.

I have had the privilege of working alongside Tennessee National Guard members during my 26 years in the Tennessee Army National Guard. I know from working with these men and women that their dedication to Tennessee and to our nation is unequaled. That dedication has been proven time and time again.

Immediately following the attacks on our nation on September 11, 2001, members of the Tennessee National Guard responded. Guard members secured airports and Tennessee landmarks, refueled fighters for battle and prepared for deployment overseas. The 164th Airlift Wing from Memphis deployed four C-141 aircraft within 20 hours of the attacks. The 118th Airlift Wing helped save the life of a small child on September 11th of that year by transporting a liver transplant from Nashville to Texas.

Now, thousands of Tennessee's National Guard troops are again answering the call to duty, leaving their families, homes and jobs to serve our country in its time of need.

Mr. Speaker, I hope you will join me in honoring the thousands of Tennessee volunteers who are serving our country honorably as members of the Tennessee National Guard.

Mr. Speaker, today I want to tell you about Tommie Goodwin, a fine public servant who dedicated himself to the people of Tennessee during a distinguished 20-year tenure as mayor of the City of Trenton, Tennessee.

Tommie first became mayor of Trenton in 1983 and served honorably in that capacity until his passing last year. Under Mayor Goodwin's leadership, our community made great strides in economic development and improvements in the quality of life of our citizens.

Mayor Goodwin's service was also beneficial to our neighbors throughout Gibson County and the state of Tennessee, leading to his recognition as Mayor of the Year in 2000 by the Tennessee Municipal League.

Tommie Goodwin cared deeply about those around him, and that was clear in the dedicated service he provided to our neighbors in Trenton. While we all miss Tommie, we will never be able to forget all he did for Tennessee.

Mr. Speaker, I ask that you join me in honoring a distinguished public servant, an outstanding citizen and my friend, Mr. Tommie Goodwin.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to recognize the celebration of Tunisian Independence Day, a historical occasion that occurred forty- seven years ago today when the people of Tunisia officially declared independence.

Since that time, the people of Tunisia have begun building the foundation for a great democracy, a process that continues to move forward. The almost ten million citizens of Tunisia now live in a country that shares many of the democratic values that make our own nation great, including civil rights, a more open political process and a thriving culture that highlights the history of the Tunisian people.

The quality of life for the Tunisian people has been greatly improved in recent decades, largely due to trade agreements and economic development in the nation's urban areas and elsewhere. There are great economic strides still to be made, but much progress has been made in a relatively short period of time, and that progress will continue.

Tunisia has been an important friend of the United States throughout history, including serving as an important ally in the ongoing war on terrorism. Mr. Speaker, I am hopeful that our relationship will continue to strengthen as Tunisia continues building onto its democratic foundation.

Mr. Chairman, the Blue Dog budget is based on a very simple premise that basically says that our generation needs to be willing to have the courage to pay the bills that we are incurring and not pass this staggering debt on to our children.

As hard as this may be to imagine, we the people of the United States of America owe $6.4 trillion. If we follow the budget plan that the majority has put forward, that number will balloon to $10 trillion, and our country will be unable to meet its obligations. Can you imagine the richest country on Earth dead broke?

Eight months ago Congress increased the debt ceiling by $450 billion to pay for additional spending and tax cuts. Now the Treasury Department has notified us that we have reached this new debt limit, and it will have to be increased in the coming weeks.

It gets even worse. The Congressional Budget Office recently reported that the deficit for this year will be $287 billion, and that is without paying any cost of the war that has begun in Iraq. They also predicted over the next 10 years another $2 trillion of debt will be piled onto what we have already incurred.

Last year taxpayers in this country paid an accrued $332 billion in interest on revenues of $1.8 trillion. That amounts to a Federal debt tax on American families of 18 cents on every dollar. Said another way, we have an 18 percent mortgage on this country, and it is growing.

Notwithstanding the moral arguments of what we are doing to the next generation of Americans, at some point, in order to make the public investment needed to keep a world-class military, a healthy and educated workforce, and the bricks-and-mortar infrastructure that enables private enterprise in this country to flourish, we must stop deficit spending.

People since the dawn of civilization have tried to borrow themselves rich. It never worked then, and it will not work now, and it will not work in the future. That is exactly the prescription that the Republicans are asking us to follow; we can borrow ourselves rich. It will never happen.

We must stop the hemorrhaging, the hemorrhaging, from the Federal Treasury, because it is bleeding from every pore of our body. Any rational person understands that this business plan for our country is not a tenable plan and cannot be sustained over time.

Now, here we are debating today what direction our country will take. This plan includes no cuts in the veterans' programs that some have talked about. But it does something else. At this moment when our men and women in uniform are in battle, they are the only people in this society being asked to sacrifice anything, anything, and that is absolutely unfair. It is not only unfair, it is immoral. So what we have done in the Blue Dog plan is we have asked the most financially well-to-do people in this country to defer the additional tax cuts they get in addition to everybody else under our plan, we have asked them to defer their additional tax cuts in order to help pay for this war so that we do not continue to dig this hole deeper.

Now, I agree with the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Nussle) on one thing: When you say in Washington, and only in Washington, that an increase is considered a cut because it is not a projected increase, then it is considered a cut here, that is baloney, and I agree with the gentleman. I will also tell the gentleman that when you try to accuse somebody of raising taxes on a tax cut that is not yet effective, that is equally political baloney, and everybody knows it.

I just would say this: Something has got to be done. We cannot continue down this road of debt, more debt and more debt. And if we do not do something about it, we have completely abdicated our responsibility not only to our country today, but to our country tomorrow. That is why I would urge every Member who worries about the financial condition of this country and its ability to maintain the world-class military that we all desire and all of the other things I have talked about, please consider voting for and supporting the Blue Dog budget.