Bobby Scott: “To show how this deficit also looks, let us look at another way of looking at it, and that is, of the budget, how much…”

“To show how this deficit also looks, let us look at another way of looking at it, and that is, of the budget, how much of today's budget is paid for with borrowed money? When President Clinton ran up a surplus, obviously we were not borrowing any money to pay for the operation of government. But when this administration came in, we started borrowing money, and in fact this year almost one-third, and with the new numbers, more than one-third of the on-budget spending is paid for with borrowed money. You borrow it from Medicare and Social Security, and then you borrow the rest, and over one-third is paid for with borrowed money. You can see, we have not done that since World War II. We are in a peacetime economy, and we are borrowing a higher percentage of the Federal budget. The spending we have in the Federal budget, a higher percentage is paid for with borrowed money than at any time since World War II. This is irresponsible. Now, how did we get in that mess? Well, we had tax cuts. Who got the tax cuts? I remember one candidate during the campaign, President Bush, said the vast majority of his tax cuts will go to those at the bottom. Let us see what that looks like on a chart. The bottom 20 percent, the next 20 percent, the middle 20 percent, this is about what they got, the percentage of the tax cut they got. Then the fourth 20 percent. The upper 20 percent got 70 to 80 percent of the tax cut. In fact, the top 1 percent got more than half of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.”