[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 1] [House] [Pages 12-13] [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]THE CLIMBING DEBT BURDEN The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Burton) is recognized for 5 minutes. Mr. BURTON of Indiana. You know, Mr. Speaker, I get a big kick out of my colleagues from the other side of the aisle who continue to beat on the Bush administration. I mean, we're not in the Bush administration. We are in the Obama administration. And the Obama administration this year has outlined a $3.55 trillion budget. They always seem to come down when they talk about President Bush and his administration, some of the shortcomings--and there has never been an administration that didn't have some shortcomings--but they don't talk much about what's happened since they took power. When the Democrats took over Congress less than 3 years ago, the national debt was under $9 trillion. It went from $9 trillion to $10 trillion to $11 trillion to over $12 trillion. That's just in the last 3 years. They're spending money like it's going out of style. They have increased the national debt limit five times in just the last 3 years, and the increase of $3.4 trillion is 38 percent-plus over what the national debt was when they took control of this Chamber and the other Chamber. It really bothers me when they talk about all this in retrospect and they don't pay any attention to what's going on now and what should be going on in the future. They're talking about a national health care plan now that is going to cost, I believe, $3 trillion over the next decade, and they're behind closed doors, trying to ram that thing through without really having even a conference committee. They're doing it with just the leaders, and they're doing it in a smoke-filled room with--well, maybe they don't smoke. But they are doing it in a closed room where nobody can see--not even C-SPAN, even though they promised that they would. Now let's just look at what's happened since they took power with the White House as well as the House and the Senate since January of 2009. They passed the state Children's Health Insurance Program Reorganization Act, which was $73.3 billion. Then in February, they passed the stimulus bill, which has not worked. Unemployment, which was not supposed to go over 8 percent, went over 10 percent. Now it's at least 10 percent. And that bill was $1.16 trillion when you include interest. Also in February, they passed the Consolidated Appropriations Act, which was $410 billion. When you add interest to it, it's $625 billion. Then in June of 2009, they passed the defense supplemental, which was not a bad deal because we had to do something about our military personnel in combat around the world, protecting our freedoms. But in addition to what we were doing for our military personnel and defense, they had all kinds--I think they had 3,000 or 4,000 pork barrel projects stuck in there. Then in December, they passed a consolidated appropriations bill for fiscal year 2010 which was $3.554 trillion. Now the President has said just in the last couple of days, we have to do something about spending. Man, that is really, really a great statement. I wish he'd thought about that about a year ago when he first took office. But nevertheless, it's better to be aware of it now than to not do anything about it at all. But he's talking about cutting spending by between 3 and 5 percent on discretionary spending, and that's going to amount to--oh, maybe $150 billion. But he's spending $3.55 trillion. So you're still going to have about $3.4 trillion, even if we were to cut spending by about 3 to 5 percent. The spending is completely out of control. The health care bill they're talking about is not going to start providing coverage, benefits until 2013, and yet the taxes start right now, which means simply that the $1 trillion they are talking about being the cost of that health care plan is not going to be $1 [[Page 13]] trillion; it's going to be at least $1.5 trillion. And if it's anything like other government programs that they have rammed through in the past, it will double that. And I really believe we are going to see a $3 trillion cost to the health care bill in this next decade if they pass it. I'm very hopeful that the Senate--some Senator, at least one or two-- will see the light and realize the American people simply don't want that. The overwhelming majority of Americans don't want anything coming between them and their doctor, especially government. They don't want socialized medicine, and they don't want all this spending. They want to do what Ronald Reagan did back in the early 1980s when he came in, and the situation was even worse then. We had 12 percent unemployment. We had 14 percent inflation, a misery index of 26 percent--that's what they called it. And Reagan came in, instead of raising taxes, as many of his advisers said he should do, he said, No, no, I'm going to cut taxes. I'm going to cut taxes across the board for individuals, for businesses, for corporations, for industry. Because if we give them more of their tax money back, they'll be able to spend more on investment. They'll be able to spend more to buy cars and refrigerators and everything else. And as a result, the economy turned around, and we had a 20-year expansion of the economy, which was unparalleled in my lifetime. Yet we haven't learned from John F. Kennedy, and we haven't learned from President Reagan. We're doing exactly the opposite. We're spending money like it's going out of style and coming up with new government programs which are going to cost jobs and dig us into a debt that we're never going to get out of. It's going to cause inflation and higher taxes. What we should be doing right now, as I have said on this floor many times, is we should go back to the Reagan and John F. Kennedy formula and cut taxes, give this economy a real shot in the arm by letting people keep more of their money, and you will see us create jobs. We won't have 10 percent unemployment in a year or two or three. It will be down. It will be going down. It will be going down fairly rapidly once this starts to take hold. But as long as we just keep spending and spending and spending and digging ourselves into a deeper hole by coming up with new programs like this crazy health care bill they're talking about, we're never going to solve our problem. And our kids and our grandkids and the posterity of this country are going to look back and say, Why did you do this to us? Why did you do this to us? ____________________