DENNIS A. CARDOZA: “one of the things that my constituents ask me when I go home is how we got into this mess, and they say, well, it was…”

“one of the things that my constituents ask me when I go home is how we got into this mess, and they say, well, it was just a few years ago in 1997, we actually started paying down the national debt. Then when Mr. Clinton left office in the year 2000, we were actually making good progress paying down the debt and we had 4 years a row in balance and paying down. But there is one very critical thing that happened in 2001, and that was that the PAYGO rules were suspended. Those rules were put in place by a bipartisan Congress in 1997, and those PAYGO rules said that you had to pay for what you spent, just like we have to do in our home budget. {time} 2330 And if you were to spend more money, you had to either find a budget cut someplace, or you had to find tax revenues to pay for it. So for 4 years, on a bipartisan agreement negotiated between Newt Gingrich and President Clinton, the country lived within its means. Then in the year 2001, those rules were suspended. Since that has happened, we have amassed some of the biggest deficits in the history of our country, all financed, or virtually all financed, unfortunately, through deficit spending. And that is being financed by foreign governments. In fact, our colleague, John Tanner, is very often quoted as saying that we have borrowed more money from foreign governments in the last 5 years than in the rest of the history of the United States combined.…”