JOHN LINDER: “Mr. Speaker, we are asked to believe that $34 billion in spending in this new bill is an emergency and thus need not be…”

“Mr. Speaker, we are asked to believe that $34 billion in spending in this new bill is an emergency and thus need not be paid for. But since this is the eighth extension of UI benefits in the past 2 years, Members need to ask, can the eighth bill do anything that is still really a budget emergency? In those two years, and counting the bill before us, we will have spent $125 billion in Federal tax dollars for UI benefits. We have paid for exactly $2 billion of that, and done so by raising taxes on jobs. That is a lot of unpaid-for emergency spending. All because of a bankrupt ideology on the other side that thinks the unemployed are somehow helped more when we use borrowed money to provide benefits than when we cut some other spending to actually pay for them. In the real world, people set priorities. They buy one thing, but not another, if they can't afford both. But in this House, which can't be bothered to consider a budget even in time of record deficits and debt, setting priorities is far too much to expect. Yet that sort of priority setting is exactly what we were promised with the Democrats' PAYGO rules.”