On the recordJuly 14, 2011
as we all know, in the next few weeks we are going to have to be faced with a decision about what to do with the debt limit, and of course there has been a lot of discussion around here as well as between the White House and the congressional leadership about how best to resolve this issue. I believe what it really comes down to is a question about what is the best way to resolve a debt crisis. I think it creates a great debate, a philosophical debate about do we need to grow government or do we need to shrink government. I would argue that is kind of the defining line in this debate, whether you believe the best way out of a debt crisis is to expand and grow government or whether you think, as I do, that we ought to make government smaller, not larger, if we are trying to figure out how to get out of this particular circumstance we find ourselves in right now. We have a $14 trillion debt. We are going to have to increase the borrowing authority to get to the 2012 election by $2.4 trillion. That is the rate at which our debt is growing. I have said on the floor before that if you look at just the daily borrowing our Federal Government does, it exceeds the entire budget of my State of South Dakota for a whole year. So we will borrow more in the next 24 hours here in Washington, DC--about $4 billion--than the State of South Dakota spends in an entire year. That is the dimension of the problem we are facing.…
