Luke Messer: “I appreciate the gentleman's comments. I certainly appreciate his support for the legislation. I would just suggest I…”

“I appreciate the gentleman's comments. I certainly appreciate his support for the legislation. I would just suggest I don't think this is meaningless at all. I think it is important that we let the American taxpayer understand the true cost of operating our government with constant deficits. When you throw around numbers in this town like billion and trillion, it is very hard to put them into a scale that the average American can understand. When you look at a $400-billion deficit that we now have on the books--and somehow brag to ourselves, as if we are somehow serving the American people well--and you divide that by 152 million taxpayers, it is over $3,000 we are still adding to the debt. When you look at the entire national debt of $18 trillion, it is $150,000 a person. It is unsustainable. There are, of course, costs to the economy. No one is suggesting that a bill collector is going to come to an individual taxpayer's door, knock, and ask for $150,000. But it gives us a sense of the scale of debt that we are accumulating--five times, for the individual taxpayer, the average wage in this American society. It is unsustainable, and it ought to be called out. That is why we have this bill. I think there can be honest disagreements about how we solve our fiscal challenges, but no disagreement about the fact that we ought to be transparent with the American people about what we are doing. Mr.…”