On the recordMay 12, 2011
I thank the gentleman from Arkansas for yielding and for talking about these important issues, and one thing that I do want to talk about is something you just said: kicking the can down the road. We can no longer afford to do that because every year we do not address and solve the problems related to our mandatory spending, they add close to $10 trillion each year to our unfunded liabilities. Those are the liabilities that are going to be put on the backs of our children and our grandchildren. So kicking the can down the road is no longer an option. Now, I want to get back to something the gentleman from Arkansas talked about earlier, and that is about making America competitive in the global marketplace. We live in a global economy. Nothing is going to change that, but what America has to do and what we have to do here in the House is to make America the most competitive country on the face of the Earth. We need to make America the best place and the safest place to do business, and that's what we were charged to do when we came in in this 112th Congress, and that's what we've been doing from day one. Because when we came in here, we said we were going to do two things. We were going to get the American people back to work by creating jobs and pro-growth economic policies, and we were going to rein in our out- of-control Federal spending. And we've been doing that. Since day one, week by week, we have been addressing our problem with out-of-control government spending.…
