On the recordJune 17, 2010
I offered a rather lengthy amendment to this bill, not because I was trying to be cute, but I think the American people have got to hear from us on whether we are going to make some of the commonsense changes they would expect us to make. There are a lot of easy votes in this amendment. I mean, to not pay contractors when they do not deserve to be paid, whether to continue to do it, we did it to the tune of $6 billion at the Pentagon in the last 6 years. That is not hard. To quit printing and wasting money on printing things we should not be printing, that is not hard. But the debate is. It is just as important as taking care of those people who are unemployed. If we don't cycle through to a good recovery, we are going to have less opportunity to borrow money to help those people who are unemployed. We now stand at a crossroads we have never been at before. Our gross debt is in excess of $17 trillion. Our net debt is at $13.2 trillion. The difference between that is the money the Congress has stolen from Social Security and myriad other trust funds that are much smaller. But we have borrowed it and put a piece of paper in that says: We will pay you back. The fact is, we have to pay interest. It is compounded. We will eventually have to pay it back.
