On the recordMay 16, 2012
we are currently borrowing $50,000 a second. We borrow $4 billion a day, and we are borrowing over $1 trillion every year. The situation has gotten out of control, and I think the situation of our deficit and our country threatens our country. In fact, I think it is the No. 1 threat to our national security, and our security as a nation is this overwhelming burden of debt. Many economists have said this burden of debt is actually causing us to lose 1 million jobs a year. It crowds out private investment because we have to take care of financing this enormous debt. Amidst all of this, we have rules in place. There is a Budget Act that we have had in place since the 1970s that requires that this body put forward a budget. The problem is we have no budget and have had no budget for 3 years. Now, one would say: How can this be when we have a law that says the majority party has to have a budget, and yet we have no budget? They are in defiance of the law. Then if you were to come to us and say you want money spent on X item, we can't even do anything about it because there are no appropriations bills. If we don't have a budget, we don't have appropriations bills, and we can't alter up or down the appropriations bills because we don't have a budget to go by. In fact, every bit of spending we do here is in defiance of our own rules because we are supposed to compare the spending bills to the budget, and we have no budget.…
