On the recordJanuary 13, 2010
I thank the gentleman for yielding. Just talking about these numbers, how are we going to pay for this? We are looking at 21, 22, $23 trillion in the outyears here. The question is how are we going to pay for this. We owe $3 trillion to foreign governments, over $800 billion owed to the Chinese alone, our largest creditor. Down the road when the Chinese and the Italians, all these governments are now saying, Wait a minute, America, you have got to do something about your spending. You have got to get this under control. They are worried about something. They are worried about getting paid back, and they don't want to see this debt that we owe them become cheap money, and so they are getting concerned about this. But if you just go back to 1981, 1982, if we go to those years when the Federal Government was out there borrowing heavily, we had 21 rac{1}{2} percent interest rates in this country. I was just starting to practice law back then, and we had to write land contracts if a person wanted to sell a house. You couldn't go to the bank and get a loan because there was no money. The seller would meet with the buyer and they would say, In 3 years time, you are going to pay me so much interest and principal. And hopefully at the end of that time there would be a balloon payment to try this pay this thing off if they could get a loan.
