The Public Record
This chart shows the percentages of our debt that are held by foreigners. As you can see, they have steadily increased to the point where in 2004 the share of foreign-owned debt rose to 44 percent. One of the reasons that it is difficult…
Yes. It is a serious problem. It is a result of policies. It did not just fall off out of the sky. It is not terrorism necessarily. It is not war, even. It is the fiscal policies of this administration. Now, one thing we did, as the…
Here is one good chart that does just that. The gentleman can see it better than I can from his vantage point. We can see what they projected. In the year 2002 they projected a surplus of $313 billion. That was with the implementation of…
The gentleman mentioned what they told us about repayment of the debt. If the gentleman recalls, they said if you pass our budget, including these tax cuts, $1.5 trillion, $1.6 trillion in tax cuts, with interest even more, we will not be…
Well, we have to probably inflate our currency. But let us not get into that. We are still not in that bad of shape, and I do not want to get into dire predictions. But we are forewarned. We all know there are limits to which anyone can…
Well, as I acknowledged, terrorists and war and recession have all taken a toll on the budget. But the President has basically taken the attitude that we can have guns, butter, and tax cuts too, and never mind the deficits. The tax cuts…
all of us who go out into the field to see our troops, and particularly overseas, bring back many conclusions and various impressions; but to a person, we all come back impressed, inspired, and thankful for the men and women who serve in…
When the President sold his tax cuts to the Congress, his Treasury Secretary and his Director of OMB both said, We will not need to come back to you until 2008 to ask for the debt ceiling of the United States to be increased. They were…
When you have an enormous increase in debt service like this, what it does is crowd off, trade off, other things that would normally be purchased, defense and non-defense goods and services. Instead, the one thing that is truly obligatory…
the deficit is worse, and the gentleman makes an excellent point. When the surplus, and Social Security is running a surplus next year and this of $150 billion to $160 billion, that amount is actually offset against the gross deficit in…
This is before the private accounts. When the private accounts are layered on top of this, they add so much to the deficit it is hard to predict what will be left of the accounts and items and projects that were just referenced.
The gentlewoman has touched upon major impacts. One of our problems is the President's budget is lacking in detail as to all of the program, project and activity cuts that they would actually propose in the years after 2006. It is hard to…
When those adjustments are made, the numbers the gentleman just gave will only get worse.
we received last week the budget of the United States, as requested by President Bush, for fiscal year 2006. And having looked at it to some extent, I have to say we regret that it continues the same bad choices that have led to huge…
we had two rules in the 1990s that applied from 1990 through the year 2000, really until 2002, and those rules effectively said, number one, the pay-go rule, if you want to increase an entitlement, liberalize the benefits of an entitlement…
When the President came to office, he had an advantage that no President in recent times had enjoyed, a surplus projected to be $5.6 trillion between 2002 and 2011... That surplus is now gone, vanished. In its place there is a deficit over…
No question about it. When you add this on top of it, it becomes almost irreversible. I do not see how you can add this and ever expect to see the budget close to balance again.
This chart right here shows something else that is left out of the budget for 2006. The President, acknowledging that he has a deficit in 2005 of $427 billion, and it is likely to be at least that large in 2006, nevertheless asked for…
The gentleman is correct. When the President came to office, we had before us in Congress a novel idea, which would have been truly a conservative fiscal proposal, namely, that we would take the surplus in Social Security alone and instead…
The numbers we are talking about are the unified deficit numbers. That is to say, we consolidate all of the accounts of the budget. Social Security is actually in surplus now and will be for some years to come, so the surplus of about $160…
Privatization means that tax funds that are now put in a public trust fund will instead go into private accounts that will cause the government to borrow more and more and more over time. The Bush administration acknowledges that between…
No, it is not included. And what I am saying here is this additional debt will be stacked on top of what is already monumental statutory debt of the United States growing every year because of the deficit in our regular budget, growing…
I rise with heavy heart to pay tribute to a dear friend, an exemplary Member of this institution, and a great American. Bob Matsui did more than represent the Fifth District of California. He represented the best in American politics…
The year 2001. The President saw, looking out 10 years, surpluses of $4.6 trillion, and he said we can have it all, tax cuts and surpluses too. So he sent us a budget with enormous tax cuts. We warned against buying into those projections…
we are here because the Secretary of the Treasury has warned us that he has run out of tricks. Five times he has written the leadership of the Congress and told us that he was approaching the legal limit which Congress has imposed by law…
Politicians like John Spratt
