Austin Scott: “Thank you very much. It is always a pleasure to come down and to be able to communicate with the American people with my…”

“Thank you very much. It is always a pleasure to come down and to be able to communicate with the American people with my distinguished members of our Blue Dog Coalition. What I would like to do as a part of this discussion tonight is to certainly communicate why we need to institute and maintain what we have instituted or reinstituted, and that is PAYGO, to pay our bills as we go. Let me see if I can just set the stage to show the American people just how precarious a position we are in both from a national security standpoint as well as an economic security standpoint. As we stand right now, the national debt is a staggering $9.13 trillion. That is almost $10 trillion of national debt. And just to show you how serious this is, we are accumulating this debt at an astounding rate of $1.4 billion every single day. That amounts to nearly $10 billion every week that we are adding to our national debt. And then we compound that. This debt is not free. We must pay interest on this debt. And the interest on this debt last year alone was an astounding $430 billion. So I can put that in perspective. Just the interest that we pay for borrowing this money is four times more than what we pay for education, for the health of our children, for our veterans and homeland security combined. Folks, that's mighty, mighty dangerous ground for this country to be on. That is one of the foremost reasons why we must change this direction, or else we are going off the cliff.”