On the recordJune 17, 2010
I want, first of all, to commend Mr. Chaffetz for his proposal, which would save taxpayer money and which would potentially help cut into the huge deficit, the huge debt that we have, in a very significant way. As he mentioned, we have a national debt of over $13 trillion now. The Congress recently voted to raise the debt limit to $14.3 trillion. That's an incomprehensible figure. But what it means is that in a few short years we're not going to be able to pay all of our Social Security, veterans' pensions, and civil service pensions and all of the things we promised our own people with money that will buy anything. The Congress in those years will not politically be able to come in and cut the benefits, but they'll just print more money. And then people will find that their pensions that they were counting on will buy a third or a half of what they expect.
