Dave Camp: “As a member of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility, or Debt Commission, we received testimony from experts…”

“As a member of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility, or Debt Commission, we received testimony from experts in economic policy research; and they said that when debt loads of a country reach above or at 90 percent of their economy or GDP, that results in the reduction in economic growth in that country by about 1 percentage point. And using the administration's economic model, that 1 percentage point increase in our GDP or decrease in our GDP costs about a million jobs. That's why this debate is so important. It is so important to get us on a path to fiscal responsibility, to begin to bring down our national debt. The plan before us today does that. It does that with spending reductions. It does it with the sort of structural reforms in terms of spending caps that are there. But it also does it with an automatic reduction in spending if, for some reason, this select committee set up in this bill fails to come to some sort of agreement on how to reduce spending. That automatic reduction, I think, is an important backstop so the select committee will take its work seriously and do everything to come to a bipartisan solution.…”