On the recordOctober 21, 2015
I thank the gentlewoman. Madam Speaker, my colleague from Maryland made the comment just a moment ago of the ``responsibility caucus,'' that he would like to see more of that. What I would submit to everybody in this Chamber is that, ultimately, what my colleague from California's bill is all about is, indeed, just that because, if you think about it, we really are living in an age of default. Laurence Kotlikoff, from Boston University, has said that, in a thing called generational accounting, the imputed cost of governing--the imputed cost for a child born in America today in terms of future costs all in--is about 80 percent. Eighty percent is not all that far from a thing called slavery if you have to be indentured to the Federal Government for the preponderance of your life and your life's work. What this is ultimately about is defusing that bomb. Erskine Bowles was the former Chief of Staff to President Clinton. He ran a commission that looked at the way our Federal Government spent money. He said that what we have before us is the most predictable financial crisis in the history of man and that it is but 10 years off--roughly, 10 years off. So, as we have a legitimate debate--and we will have a legitimate debate between Republicans and Democrats and Independents and all of us as Americans in where we go next--what this does is defuse that bomb of a train wreck with regard to international and national credit markets as we have that debate, and that is a very good thing.…
