David Obey: “Mr. Chairman, what I would like to do here is to set the stage and explain why we are here and why we are doing this…”

“Mr. Chairman, what I would like to do here is to set the stage and explain why we are here and why we are doing this today. We have heard the gentleman from Louisiana [Mr. Livingston] and a lot of our Republican friends talk to us about deficit reduction and give us lectures about the need for deficit reduction. I think it is important to explain how this country got to this moment. This chart will I think demonstrate what has happened to this country since the end of World War II. At the end of World War II, because we needed to borrow money in order to pay for the war, we wound up with a national debt which was roughly 115 percent of our total annual national income. Under a series of Presidents, Republican and Democrat, and under Congresses which were mostly Democratic but sometimes Republican, we brought that down on a bipartisan basis through the years to the point where in 1980 our debt as a percentage of gross domestic product was about 23 or 24 percent. Then what happened is that Ronald Reagan was elected to office. He presented us a budget which essentially doubled military spending and which provided huge tax cuts for rich people, and that package was rammed through this House.”