Dave Camp: “I yield myself such time as I may consume. I am certainly concerned about the last 8 years, but I am more concerned…”

“I yield myself such time as I may consume. I am certainly concerned about the last 8 years, but I am more concerned about the last 2. I think we have got the third year in a row of trillion dollar deficits, a Presidential budget that doubled the debt in 5, tripled it in 10. I quote from the Standard and Poor's report on the United States debt: ``Because very large deficits and rising government indebtedness and the path to addressing these is not clear to us, we have revised our outlook on the long-term rating to negative from stable.'' The path to addressing these is not clear. We think it absolutely essential that we not have an unconditional increase in the debt limit, that we have the spending reductions, that we have the structural reforms that we so desperately need in this country. We have 110 Members of the other party who wrote a letter saying we want an unconditional increase in the debt; just keep spending. Don't bring in any spending reductions, don't bring any long-term reforms; just keep going the way we have been going. Well, Standard and Poor's says that if we don't address this issue-- and what does that mean that ``we have revised our outlook on the long- term rating to negative from stable''? It means buying a house is more expensive; buying a car is more expensive. Certainly our ability to sell our bonds around the world will be very difficult to do and make it that much more expensive.…”