Madam Speaker, I think the gentleman is correct in his assessment that our generation ought to be willing or have the courage to pay the bills that we are incurring for our protection and for the protection of our children and not pass on…
Madam Speaker, I think the gentleman is correct in his assessment that our generation ought to be willing or have the courage to
pay the bills that we are incurring for our protection and for the protection of our children and not pass on a debt that we have been working on to the extent that we are.
Let me give Members a few facts which are painful to even read. Right now we, the people of the United States, owe about $6.4 trillion as represented by our national debt. Even worse, 8 months ago Congress was called on to raise the debt ceiling; that is the amount of money that the people of the United States borrow. Eight months ago, we raised that debt ceiling $450 billion, which represents almost 10 percent of the then-$6 trillion debt. Do Members realize that 8 short months later we are told by the Secretary of the Treasury we are going to hit that ceiling in the next few days or weeks. That means we have run through in 8 months $450 billion of additional debt.
It gets worse. The Congressional Budget Office last week reported that the deficit for this year would be $287 billion, and that does not include any monies for a potential war in Iraq. CBO further predicted that the deficits over the next 10 years if we continue to follow the economic model that we are operating under right now and do the things the President has suggested with regard to the Tax Code, that over the next 10 years we will rack up almost $2 trillion of additional debt.
Now any rational businessperson understands that such an economic business plan, either in their business or for the country's business, is unsustainable; and the reason it is unsustainable is because interest must be paid on this debt. Last year we, the people of this country, paid $332 billion, paid and accrued $332 billion of interest on the national debt. The revenue of the Federal Government last year was $1.8 trillion. That means we have a debt tax, D-E-B-T, debt tax of 18 cents out of every dollar. Said another way, we have an 18 percent mortgage on our country and this debt tax, as we continue to borrow more and more money, is the only tax increase on the American people that cannot be repealed because interest has to be paid.
This does not even touch the moral argument of what we are doing to the next generation. I told somebody the other day, I said I do not think any of us in this room want to leave our children a country where the rivers and streams are so polluted that fish cannot live in it, kids cannot swim in it, and people cannot drink from them. I do not think anyone wants to leave our children a country where the air is so foul and smog infested that our children have to wear a surgical mask to ride their bicycle, and I do not think any of us want to leave our children a nation that is so burdened with debt that they will not be able to make the public investments that only the government can make to enable private enterprise to grow, expand and flourish.
If there is any businessperson in this country who thinks for one moment that private enterprise can flourish and grow without public infrastructure investment, whether it be in bricks and mortar, airports, railroads, harbors on our rivers and streams, or anything else, interstate highways. If they think private business can grow and flourish without that kind of public investment, then they have never been to a country that does not have any government because in those countries, nobody is doing any good. I have been there, seen that.
So I want to just say that under our present scheme if we listen to some, the deficits do not matter, that this is just a short-term problem. People have tried since the dawn of civilization and the invention of something we call money to borrow themselves rich. It has never worked then, and it is not working now, and anybody who thinks that we can borrow ourselves rich expects what never was and never will be.
We have a serious problem in this country. We are not doing our children right by passing on such a debt to them because we do not have the courage to either raise the necessary revenue for what we want, or we do not have the political courage to cut spending where we can. Something has got to be done, and that is why the Blue Dogs came today with a new budget for this fiscal year that will get us back on a glide path to balance. The biggest gift we could give to our country and to our children is a country that is debt free.
Just think, if we did not pay $332 billion in interest last year what we could do, either cut taxes or make the investments in education, in a world class military, in all of those things without ever raising taxes again. That is the kind of financial management I think people expect us to exhibit up here, rather than trying to borrow ourselves rich and tell them everything is going to be all right.
Madam Speaker, I just want to say that I hope people will give some consideration to the God-awful debt that this country possesses now and what is forecast for the future, and will help us as we try to wrestle with it.