On the recordDecember 14, 2010
I rise today to speak very briefly about this issue. This easily could be the most serious issue we have dealt with in recent years and in future years. We have an enemy today that is at the door. This is not an enemy that is out there somewhere and we can talk about philosophically. It is an enemy that is at the door. Last year the Federal Government spent around $3.8 trillion. That doesn't mean anything to me or probably much to anybody because nobody knows what $3.8 trillion is. If we say it is a little over $7 million a minute, it starts to sound a little bit more like we could understand it. But none of that is important. It is how much do we have. The Federal Government was short 41 percent of that money; 41 cents out of every dollar that the U.S. Government spent it borrowed. I hope everyone listened closely to the Senator from Nebraska when he said if we funded only Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the interest on the national debt, we would be short of money coming in to pay for that. If we shut down all other aspects of the Federal Government, we still could not put it in the black if we paid for just those. This moment in history is an absolutely critical moment for the American people. We have gotten jaded because all of our lives we have heard about the national debt, and we have heard about annual deficits. We get jaded about it. But these numbers today are real, they are serious, and they could bring down this government.
