On the recordApril 19, 2018
I rise today to talk about a milestone that happened about 3 weeks ago. We have a couple of interesting dates. April 15 just passed. We call it tax day. But it was another day. It was also the date we were supposed to complete the Senate budget for fiscal year 2019, which starts on October 1 of this year. Well, April 15 came, and the IRS deadline did indeed hit, but there was no budget completed. This is part of the dysfunction that people back home are so upset about. I want to talk about that today, but first I want to talk about the derivative of that broken process. In my office, we have a debt clock. A few weeks ago, that debt clock passed a milestone: $21 trillion. If that weren't bad enough, the commitments of this Federal Government over the last 50 years-- actually, indeed, over the last 100 years--the commitments that have been made in the structural programs of this big government bureaucracy have committed us to some $130 trillion over just the next 30 years. That means that every household in America owes the equivalent of $1 million per household. These are not theoretic numbers. These are mathematical realities derived from commitments made by a lot of our programs that we have passed over the last 100 years in this country. In my opinion, we are well past the tipping point with this debt. Last week, the CBO came out with their new forecast for fiscal year 2018 and beyond.…
