I do think that this House has hit what could possibly be the lowest low it has ever hit. Two weeks ago, the House that claims to be for national security refused to give this Member a vote on whether or not we would prevent another round…

We can rescind the tax cuts that have deprived us of $60 billion in revenue since they were implemented, and I will vote to do that in a heartbeat.

Mr. Chairman, I would hope that the previous speaker and all other speakers would take the time to look at this. Our Nation is now $5,984,677,357.213.86 in debt. In the past 12 months, since the President talked about this town being awash…

I am adamantly opposed to base closures. After the first three rounds of base closure, we cannot name one weapons system that has been purchased with base closure money. We cannot find one general, one admiral, one Secretary of Defense…

when I was a kid, and when a guy named Mike Parker was a kid, it was fairly common for schoolteachers to talk about a story. We do not know if it is true or not, but they certainly told kids about a young man who, as a child, had a…

I encourage my colleague from Louisiana, my neighboring State, to look at these numbers. This is from published Treasury reports. The gentleman said this money comes out of payroll taxes. That is right. Most of the folks I represent pay…

I know we are human beings. I am just asking for consideration in the future to try and do better. Mr. Speaker, my second request, as pointed out in the excellent hearing we had last week with the commandant of the Coast Guard, there is…

Mr. Speaker, the bill does a lot of good things, and some of the more heinous provisions of the bill that troubled me earlier, such as the licensing requirement on charter boat operators have been removed. Some very bad calls on Jones Act…

Three or 4 years from now, it probably will not be remembered for what it has done for military procurement, because it does not do much. It buys only six ships for the fleet, which is actually one ship less than the Clinton administration…

I wish I could have kept NAFTA from coming to the floor because it has lost so many jobs for my fellow Mississippians and every American. I wish I could have kept portions of that tax bill that saw to it that half of the $1.2 trillion in…

How can anyone look the American people in the eye and say we have a surplus when we owe the Social Security trust fund $1 trillion? There is no account. There is no money. They have nothing but IOUs. But somebody else is going to get a…

I have to confess it was not until I was elected to Congress that I fully appreciated just how tough a job our priests and preachers and rabbis and ministers have. See, Mr. Speaker, I have discovered that when something goes wrong, the…

If we should have been embarrassed for Congressmen writing checks on money that was not there, should we not be ashamed that we are passing tax cuts on a day when we owe the Social Security system $1.1 trillion? We have taken their money…

I guess many of my colleagues would like to ignore that, but they cannot ignore the fact that we owe the Social Security Trust Fund $1 trillion of unfunded liability. We owe our Nation's military retirees, including the gentleman who just…

for those Americans who are paying into the Social Security system and have paid into it, some a lot longer than others, you would probably be shocked to know that our Nation owes the Social Security trust system $1.7 trillion. That is…

I would counter by saying, and probably shocking you when I told you that the most wasteful thing our Nation does, we squandered $1 billion yesterday, the day before that, the day before that, tomorrow, and every day of the rest of our…

Our Nation is 5 trillion 700 billion dollars in debt. What the gentleman from California will not tell us is that the people who benefit the most from this tax break are the same people who own this debt and the same people who are on the…

The promise made during the Reagan years was that that $1 trillion would be set aside. That promise was never kept in the Reagan years, it was never kept in the Bush presidency, it was never kept in the Clinton presidency. The question is…

For the record, for the fiscal year 2001, the Treasury has already spent $144 billion on interest on the national debt. That is the first 5 months of this year. Contrast that with fiscal year 2000, the Treasury spent $362 billion on…

I will ask every American who listens to the debate tomorrow, listen for this number, $5,735,859,380,573.98. You will not hear one proponent of the tax cut admit to the American people that that is how far in debt we are, and almost all of…

The most wasteful thing this Nation does is to squander $1 billion a day each and every day on interest on the national debt. We did it yesterday. We did it the day before that, the day before that. We will do it tomorrow and we will do it…

Despite the promises made by Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan in the 1980s when they raised individual taxes by 15 percent on working Americans to pay for these things. The gentleman is exactly right. If I may, and I know everyone else…

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration, with a Democratic House, Republican Senate, increased by 15 percent payroll tax on working Americans toward Social Security and Medicare, because they realized, because of the demographic change…

I think the first place we have to start is with the legislation I introduced last week, with a constitutional amendment that honors the promise that was made to Americans, a constitutional amendment that protects the Social Security Trust…

Let me say that in regard to the gentleman's comments from Mississippi, he spoke very eloquently, but he said that during his lifetime, a great deal of that debt was accumulated during his lifetime. I might add that a great deal of that…