Deborah Koff Ross: “I have to give it to this President, who has managed to give us the largest budget deficit in our Nation's history…”

“I have to give it to this President, who has managed to give us the largest budget deficit in our Nation's history, while at the same time cutting programs that are important to people, programs for education, programs for farm families, and the list goes on and on. How does he continue to do that? He proposes tax cuts for those earning more than $400,000 a year. I do not have many folks in my district who earn $400,000 a year. I have voted for tax cuts in the past. Back in times of surplus, before 9/11 and before Iraq and Afghanistan when we really had a surplus, I thought it made sense to give people some of their money back. But for us to continue to borrow money from foreign governments to give tax breaks may make for good politics, but it makes for bad fiscal policy. But what the gentleman is talking about in terms of the foreign debt, again the debt $8,270,385,415,129 and some change. Who owns that debt? Who do we owe that money to? Well, we owe $2.174 trillion to foreign lenders. Compare that to only $23 billion we owed to foreign holdings back in 1993. As the gentleman from California pointed out earlier, this administration, this President, this Republican Congress, has borrowed more money from foreign central banks and foreign investors in the past 5 years than the previous 42 Presidents combined. Who are they? Japan is the top 10. Japan, we owe them $682.8 billion. China has loaned our government $249.8 billion. The United Kingdom, $223.2 billion.…”