María Elvira Salazar: “as we debate the Senate budget resolution for fiscal year 2007 and the bill before us now to raise the debt ceiling, I…”

“as we debate the Senate budget resolution for fiscal year 2007 and the bill before us now to raise the debt ceiling, I want to talk for a moment about the broader issue of fiscal responsibility and honesty. We are about to significantly raise the limit on our national debt for the fourth time in the past 5 years, this time to nearly $9 trillion. With deficits as far as the eye can see, we are on an unsustainable budgetary path that threatens not only to severely restrict our Government's ability to provide critical services but to cause irreparable damage both to our economy and our influence in the world community. Alan Greenspan articulated our situation clearly in his last months as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Mr. Greenspan said, ``our budget position will substantially worsen in the coming years unless major deficit-reducing actions are taken . . . crafting a budget strategy that meets the nation's longer-run needs will become more difficult the more we delay.'' Even more troubling, our deficits are worse than they seem. While the Congressional Budget Office has estimated the size of this year's deficit at $371 billion, that figure does not account for the tens of billions of dollars of emergency supplemental spending that we can all anticipate to address needs in Iraq and Afghanistan.…”