Ron Kind: “And, Mr. Speaker, not one Republican back then had supported the pay-as-you-go rules that required tough political…”

“And, Mr. Speaker, not one Republican back then had supported the pay-as-you-go rules that required tough political decision-making, trade-offs, in essence, with the budget, which is something that the Democrats in Congress today are advocating in the alternative budget resolutions that were submitted, because it worked so well in the 1990s, the pay-as-you-go rules, which are very simple. If you are proposing a pay increase or a tax cut in one area, you have to find an offset in the budget to pay for it in order to maintain balance. And it led to the 4 years of budget surpluses, as the gentleman pointed out, 2 years of which the Social Security-Medicaid trust fund was not even being raided but, instead, we could use that money for important debt reduction, starting to pay off the national debt. I was here during that first Bush tax-cut debate we had a few years ago where the big concern, on the Republican side at least, was that we were going to pay off the national debt too fast, if you could believe those days, which never materialized. But now today, we are back into chronic budget deficits, and one of the fastest growing areas in the budget today is interest on the national debt. I see two major problems with the huge budget deficits today that are unprecedented and we did not face before. One is, who is owning that debt? Who is paying for our deficit financing? Right now, Japan is the number one purchaser of our government debt, soon to be surpassed by China.”