The Public Record
the Medicare trustees released their report last week and issued a warning that the Medicare System will be bankrupt in 4 years. When I tell seniors back in my district of that and when I tell my own mom and dad of this, they ask me, how…
What American does not dream of creating a better life for himself, his family and his children. What American does not dream of living in a community where children are safe, the rights of all are respected and people feel a sense of…
This is more than an issue about numbers and whether we need to pay down the debt or balance the budget. It is an issue about morals, and it is one of many moral issues facing America today. When a generation concludes that it is all right…
I just point out that, if we do not get to a balanced budget, if we do not do what is right to stop this growth of debt, the opportunities for the children of this Nation are going to go away. The most important thing we can possibly do is…
I would conclude tonight with a very optimistic picture for the future of this great Nation that we live in. We have it within our grasp, within our means, within our understanding to do what is right for the future of this country. We…
Would the gentleman not say that is also true of the Social Security issue? The issue where the Federal Government is collecting out of paychecks about $65 billion more than it is paying back out to seniors and that that money is supposed…
I would just add in the defense area that defense is not above wasting some money either and certainly is subject to our review as we find areas of waste within defense so that those dollars can be reallocated and better spent for the…
I want to mention, and we have talked about this a little, how this is really a tough dilemma, because on one hand we have flood victims who are truly in need of help, and on the other hand we have the responsibility to the future…
There is kind of a myth going on out here in Washington D.C., and I noticed it at our town hall meetings, we just held about 20 of them. The myth has really penetrated to the public that they believe defense spending has gone straight up…
I use another example when we talk about how much the Federal Government is spending every year, you know, and you hear all this discussion about spending cuts out here. The Federal Government this year is spending $6,500 on behalf of…
My background is as a math teacher and then as a home-builder, and I kind of combined the things I learned in both of those to figure out a very straightforward procedure to do it. For any of our colleagues listening tonight, we have the…
They are paying it with IOU's, exactly right. This really becomes important if I can just go to why this is important not only to senior citizens, but it is important to people in their 50's and in their 40's and it is important to our…
In 1997, we expect that number to read in the range of $74 billion. So they will take another $74 billion worth of IOU's. They will spend the $74 billion on other government programs, and they will simply put IOU's in the trust fund.
Such as a negotiable Treasury bond or a CD, something which our senior citizens are very familiar with. In fact, I think it is very important that we understand that the money that is being collected for Social Security today, and I have a…
The CPI today is determined by looking at 90,000 different articles, 90,000 goods. They call it the basket of goods. They go into 22,000 different stores across America and they look at 35,000 rental units. So this is a huge number of…
In 1996, this blue area on the chart is what the people in Washington reported to the American people as the actual deficit. What that is, is the amount they overdrew their checkbook. They overdrew their checkbook by about $107 billion in…
I think just to make this very, very clear, we are both opposing a politically motivated adjustment to CPI, or a political adjustment, and we are both supporting a mathematical computation that is accurate and that accurately reflects…
Us country folks from East Troy, WI, call that inflation. That is really what we are measuring. In very simple English, we are measuring inflation. Would the gentleman like me to walk through how they determine inflation in this country…
That is absolutely correct, and we can do it without going into the Social Security trust fund money and spending that trust fund money on other Government programs.
Right. Of that $75 billion, about $35 billion is actual cash over and above what is collected out of paychecks, and the other $40 billion is the interest on what is already in the trust fund. So, yes, they are paying all of it, it is about…
Well, to answer that I think we need to understand how Social Security fits into that picture. Because, in fact, Social Security is a very big part of whether or not we can balance the budget. A lot of people would like to take the Social…
It means $600 every month from an average family of 5 to do nothing but pay the interest on the Federal debt, 600 bucks a month. And you know when you think of a young family starting out in life or they maybe had a couple kids and you…
I think it is important to wrap it up by reiterating that we can in fact balance the budget by the year 2002, while we let the American people keep more of their own money and at the same time save the Social Security system. If we go past…
Thomas Jefferson said that. That is not today. Can you imagine if Thomas Jefferson, one of our Founding Fathers, was standing here with us today and we were showing him this debt chart, $5.3 trillion facing the American people, $20,000 for…
So what my colleague is really telling me is, out of the $122 billion we are currently spending on education, only $79 billion is actually getting out there to help the students; and the other $45 billion roughly is going to bureaucracy?
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