Jeb Hensarling: “I thank the gentleman for yielding. I also thank him for his friendship, and I thank him for his leadership in fiscal…”

“I thank the gentleman for yielding. I also thank him for his friendship, and I thank him for his leadership in fiscal sanity. Along with Chairman Goodlatte, I will be leaving Congress at the end of this year. Serving in Congress has been the greatest privilege of my life, but I leave with one great regret, and that regret is my inability to convince my colleagues of the peril of ignoring the debt trajectory this Nation is on. We cannot continue to spend money we do not have. Mr. Speaker, my iPad is awash--awash--of reports about how our spending trajectory is unsustainable. CBO, OMB, private foundations, they all conclude the same thing: the picture of national bankruptcy is ugly. It wasn't that many years ago that we saw it in Greece. We saw soup kitchens, padlocked factories, hospitals that could no longer turn on the lights, college-educated people forced into subsistence agriculture. Mr. Speaker, I don't think America is going to be Greece. I wish I knew it for a fact. But here is what I do know: if we don't quit spending money we don't have, we will become a second-rate economic power, a second-rate military power, and, frankly, a second-rate authority, moral authority, as we become the first generation in America's history to leave the next generation with a lower standard of living. That simply is not unintelligent; that is immoral. Can we have that stain on our record for generations to come? Mr.…”