I have been here for 4 years. We have come a long ways over those 4 years. We have gotten to a balanced budget for the first time in 30 years. We have restored Medicare, not by raising taxes, as was done in the past. We provided the first…

11 years ago in 1987, a Democrat Congress sent President Reagan a massive omnibus bill. It weighed about 24 pounds, had about 2100 pages. And in his State of the Union address the next year, President Reagan took that bill, slammed it on…

I hear this cry from my Republican colleagues and some from the other side as well that we should somehow take the Social Security surplus and use it to cut taxes. Why can we not do it the same way we did last year? We started talking…

My only fear listening to this, most of what you said I agree with wholeheartedly, as you well know, is that this becomes very partisan, and Social Security is too important to become partisan. Many of us Republicans also feel that it is…

I just want to kind of conclude this conversation this evening with just kind of a summary here. A lot of times what has happened and what is going to happen over the next couple of weeks is this House is going to be divided. We are going…

If we look at this chart over here, and we see that spending was going up at this rate before, and now spending is only going up at this rate and even slower yet, if the government had spent this much more money instead of doing tax cuts…

That amendment that I brought to the floor to end the cow gas study was very quickly accepted down here. Some of our colleagues may not even be aware that we were spending lots of money, the taxpayers' money to study cow gas out here…

yes, those deficits that the American people and my colleagues talked about all through the late 1980s and the early 1990s, they took all of that Social Security surplus, they put it all in the big government checkbook, they wrote out…

In 3 short years, by getting spending under control, we are now running a surplus. In 1969 when we ran a surplus it was $3 billion. The surplus this year is 80 plus, so we are talking about the most significant surplus perhaps in the…

Foreign operations. We just found it today. There are a series of other things in the same bill that are just fascinating. That is the only thing I can say is it is fascinating. It is equally fascinating as the cow gas study. When you…

we are kind of making light of that, but there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these sorts of programs. We can start with the Russian monkeys where we were sending millions of dollars of taxpayers' money to Russia to…

the facts for this year are that we may in fact have the $98 billion. It is close. It is some place between on the bottom end probably 79 or 80, and on the top end about 103 or 104 billion. The surplus is right in-between there. Right now…

If we have 90 percent of the money that is coming in for Social Security over and above what we are paying back out to seniors in benefits and 90 percent of that money is set aside and 10 percent is used for tax cuts because that is the…

Reclaiming my time again, I would like to ask my friend from Michigan that all important question, have you seen anything in your years here in Washington that would lead you to believe that somehow because we are here in Washington we…

It passed without a single, solitary Republican vote. I am sure the gentleman from Michigan remembers what I am talking about here. It is the biggest tax increase in American history.

I rise tonight to first address just briefly what my colleagues have been talking to me about, or have been talking about here on the floor in advance of me, and that is health care in America. We hear so much about HMOs that are not doing…

help me understand why it is that, as a taxpayer sends their money to Washington, and Washington decides how to best provide education for those kids back home, what exactly is it in the water out here or what is out here that makes us…

reclaiming my time, I just had town hall meetings all over the State of Wisconsin, and one question I asked in Wisconsin was how many in this room think government spending should increase faster than the rate of inflation? We didn't get…

This is not about me and it is not me that did this. We did this. A lot of new Members that came in in 1994 feel very strongly about this and we have done this together. But it is not even us that is doing it. It is the American people…

For the first time since 1969 for the last 12 months running, this government spent less money than they had in their checkbook. That is just a monumental change in the way things have been done. I should say it again because it is that…

Let me jump from there into Social Security. You mention their paychecks. At the end of each week, people do get a paycheck. Part of that money goes into Social Security. I would like to just talk through what is happening in Social…

Right. Again, I think we have to go back to this understanding that, when people out here talk about cutting spending, they do not actually mean they are cutting spending. They mean, instead of letting the growth rate be double the rate of…

I would like to translate this into what it means for an average American out there. When I look at this chart and I see the spending growth rate going down, this distance from here to here not only means a balanced budget. It means…

I have added a line in this chart, a black line. And what that does is wall off this Social Security money and forces it to go into Social Security instead of into the general fund. So, now, let us talk through these surpluses one more…