Default Prevention Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. HIMES. Mr. Speaker, I rise this morning in some horror and alarm over the so-called Default Prevention Act that this Chamber will be considering. Of all the Orwellian names that the House comes up with for legislation, this one is truly deserving of an award by the Ministry of Truth.

For those of you at home who have not been following the swirling, madcap antics around the House of Representatives lately, let me assure you that the Default Prevention Act in no way prevents a default. The Default Prevention Act, in fact, specifies that two categories of people get paid in the event that the Congress does not raise the debt ceiling. It specifies that private bondholders of U.S. Treasuries will get paid interest, and it specifies that Social Security recipients will be held harmless. They will get paid.

Now, at some level, maybe that sounds attractive; but everybody else that is expecting a check or a salary or some form of repayment by the United States Government, they are out of luck.

1.4 million Active-Duty troops, they are not in this bill as somebody who gets paid if the government doesn't raise the debt ceiling. Four million disabled veterans are out of luck under this bill. One million doctors who today are providing Medicare services to our senior citizens are out of luck. Sorry. You didn't make it into the Default Prevention Act cooked up by the Republican majority.

Mr. Speaker, this is a bill that stunningly and explicitly defines for the world, tells everybody exactly how the U.S. Government intends to be a deadbeat, who we are going to pay and who we are not going to pay, and here is how we are going to be a deadbeat.

Why would you do that? What possible sense does that make?

There are all kinds of reasons why this is a terrible piece of legislation, but let me just focus on two.

Number one, I hear constantly from my friends on the Republican side of the aisle that everything creates winners and losers: the Affordable Care Act, the Ex-Im Bank, you name it. Dodd-Frank creates winners and losers. This bill very explicitly creates winners: Social Security recipients and bondholders.

By the way, who are these bondholders? Who holds United States Treasury debt? Do you?

I will tell you who holds most of it: China. China does. This is why, on the Democratic side of the aisle, we have called this bill the Pay China First Act, which is actually a much better description of what this act actually does than the Default Prevention Act.

More seriously, Mr. Speaker, I worked in the capital markets for a long time. There is no way to gracefully default on your debt, to say, ``Oh, we will pay interest; we will pay Social Security. But we are not going to pay soldiers; we are not going to pay Medicare.'' Once you tell the world that we do not intend to abide by our obligations, the world loses its faith in the United States.

Folks, this debt ceiling is a fiction. It is an absurdist fiction. What do we get from it? The debt ceiling has never prevented the accumulation of debt. That happens because this Chamber and the United States Congress chooses to spend more money than it chooses to tax and bring in.

There are really only two ways to reduce the deficit and the debt: you can tax more, which nobody likes to do; or you can spend less, which it turns out that nobody really wants to do either because, of course, everybody in this Chamber has the things that they want to spend their money on, but the other guy's stuff, well, that we are going to cut.

So we have the ultimate hypocrisy of saying we are going to tax too little and spend too much, create a deficit, but then we are going to vote on this magical thing called the debt ceiling that will allow us to say ``I am not raising the debt ceiling because I oppose spending.'' It is absurd. And you know what? It leads to legislation like this.

Mr. Speaker, we have seen this movie before. Pretty soon in the next couple of days, grown men and women in this Chamber are going to talk about maybe the Treasury minting a high-denomination platinum coin to solve this problem, as though we were characters in some kind of ``Harry Potter'' movie instead of responsible legislators.

This needs to stop, Mr. Speaker. My constituents are sick and tired of the House of Representatives acting in this fashion: ideological and absurd. My constituents want us to come together to deal with the real problems facing America: of improving the economy, of making education accessible. But, no, we are going to spend some time on this absurdly named Default Prevention Act.

I urge my colleagues to vote against this thing and move on to more serious issues.

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