David Weldon: “I too am a sponsor of the legislation of the gentleman from Wisconsin to deal with the issue of paying off the debt. His…”

“I too am a sponsor of the legislation of the gentleman from Wisconsin to deal with the issue of paying off the debt. His plan I think is a very good plan. Once we start showing some surplus after the budget is balanced, what are we going to do with that money? It is a real legitimate question. What do we do with that money? There will be people in this body, there will be people in this city, who will want to spend it all. And to take some of that money and use it to pay off the debt early, a $5 trillion debt, use some of it to provide some more tax relief, and yes, use some of it for targeted important spending like on infrastructure. We have not been spending the kind of money we need to for roads and highways. We have to keep in mind that when we pay off that debt sooner, the interest payments get smaller, and suddenly, it is a double benefit because we are spending about $360 billion paying interest on the debt. If we did not have to make interest payments today, there would be no deficit. We would have a $100 billion, $150 billion, $250 billion surplus that we would be arguing about if the people who preceded us had made the tough decisions and had not run up this kind of a debt.”