Mike Braun: “here today, since I have been in the Senate, which has been a little over 5 years, I think I have been the most…”

“here today, since I have been in the Senate, which has been a little over 5 years, I think I have been the most steadfast voice in terms of, whatever we want to do here, we shouldn't be borrowing it from our kids and our grandkids. Any of you up there listening, it is a sad state of affairs in the sense that, just a little over 5 years ago, we were $18 trillion in debt, borrowing at the tune of about a trillion dollars a year to backfill for all the things we want to do here, and ask you and your kids to pay for it. To me, that is a bad business plan. Sadly, it gets even worse. Over these 5 years, instead of a trillion dollars annually, it is now a trillion dollars every 6 months. For those of you who are good at math, take current interest rates and apply that to $34 trillion--soon to be $35 trillion, if it has not already crossed that threshold. That is a big figure with a lot of zeroes behind it. To put it in perspective, the interest on that alone is going to be about what we spend on defense in the next year or the discretionary side of our budget. How we have ever gotten there, I don't know. We are going to be considering another package tomorrow or Friday that takes the whole process of doing budgets, asking: Do you really need it? Aren't there some places that we could surely get back to where we don't spend more than we take in, because when we don't, we are borrowing every penny of it.…”