Marcy Kaptur: “I am so happy to see the chart that Congressman Ryan has put up there on how much interest we are paying on our…”

“I am so happy to see the chart that Congressman Ryan has put up there on how much interest we are paying on our borrowing, and I will let him go into that in detail. But I will just recount a story. Back when I was first elected to the Congress during the 1980s and served on what was then the Banking Committee, now called Financial Services. That tells you something right there. We went from a nation that believed in savings to a nation that believed in borrowing, and now we owe everybody because the whole banking philosophy changed. And we, at that point, had only about 8 percent, between 6 and 8 percent of our bonds that were sold to foreign investors. And I said, hey, we shouldn't go over 10 percent. We should make sure, went to see Alan Greenspan, Paul Volcker, all the different heads of the Fed, and said let us work on a program so the American people can buy our debt instruments. Why should we be selling more and more of these debt instruments to foreign countries? And they said oh, Congresswoman, it is too much trouble to get the Fed to have a website and to let grandmothers buy saving bonds for their grandkids, you know, get it at the bank and so forth. And I told them, put it in the Post Office. Let's have postal savings stamps like Roosevelt used to have. Let's own ourselves. Let's not be owned by foreign interests. And I can remember Mr. Greenspan saying to me, well, you know, we like to deal with 20 bond houses up on Wall Street.…”