Jerry Moran: “Horrible tragedies like that cited by the two previous speakers remind us that there are simply too many guns too…”

“Horrible tragedies like that cited by the two previous speakers remind us that there are simply too many guns too readily available to too many children. It has got to stop. On a very different subject, though, Mr. Speaker, when Ronald Reagan ran for President, he said that any President who does not submit a balanced budget should be impeached. He never did balance a budget. In fact, the only times that our budget has been balanced was during the Clinton administration as a result of what is called PAYGO--that you don't increase spending without increasing a concomitant amount of revenue; and you don't cut taxes without immediately cutting the same amount of spending. That worked. We had three successive years of budget surpluses, and we passed on a $5.6 trillion projected surplus to the Bush administration. Yet, as soon as the new Republican Congress came in at the beginning of the 21st century, they eliminated PAYGO. Two wars, two deep tax cuts and a massive expansion of Medicare were never paid for. As a result, we had a $9 trillion fiscal reversal. When the Democrats came back in, we reinstated it; but yesterday the new Republican Congress exempted $5 trillion from PAYGO--$4 trillion of unpaid-for tax cuts and $1.3 trillion of savings we could have gotten from health care reform. It is the height of hypocrisy and deeply disappointing.”