America's Mandatory and Discretionary Spending

Floor Speech

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Mr. PERRY. Will the gentleman yield?

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Mr. PERRY. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my good friend from Arizona.

When I start my townhall meetings, I always start with our fiscal situation because people ask me--and I imagine it is the same in your district--what is wrong with you people in Washington? Why can't you get along? What is all the bickering about? That slide is instructive because I explain to them that nearly 70 percent of the budget we don't discuss at all, and it keeps getting smaller--the things that they kind of associate with the Federal Government--because, in their minds, these other things, the things you talked about--Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, care for our veterans, the ACA--all just happens automatically, and they think about--oh, I don't know--the IRS, the Park Service, the military. I keep telling them that it gets smaller, and so we squabble more over this diminishing pie.

I just need you to clarify something. So you say it is formula driven. That makes sense to you, and it makes sense to me.

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Mr. PERRY. But can you make that easy for a layman?

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Mr. PERRY. It is for my mother, who is already on Social Security, and it is definitely for me and for anybody who thinks he may collect Social Security, understanding that, when we say ``entitlements,'' that is not meant to be you are entitled to it. Do you know why you are entitled to it?--because the government forced you to pay into it. They forced you to invest when it comes to Social Security, right? They forced you to invest. It might not be a good investment, but you must invest. It is important, and I think you are going to talk about this a little bit in the future of how that investment is going.

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Mr. PERRY. Sure.

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Mr. PERRY. Because of the formula.

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Mr. PERRY. Right, and the population growth for those people who will be receiving benefits.

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Mr. PERRY. We have a tendency in Congress--quite honestly, we have a tendency as Americans--with our domestic and foreign policy, to just pretend that these things aren't happening.

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Mr. PERRY. What are the consequences of not doing that?

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Mr. PERRY. I sure hope so. My kids hope so.

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Mr. PERRY. They want to cut something.

Why do you spend money on--I don't know. They call them Obama funds. Or why do you spend money on foreign aid? If we just cut that, we don't have to pay for people to hate us. They will hate us for free. It all sounds all well and good, except you can cut all that completely and--I think you will show at some point--it won't make a dent. It won't even begin to make a dent.

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Mr. PERRY. More importantly, for this illustration, it is as important that we were telling the public--because the CBO projection told us that it was going to be 4.5, 4.4, but we were basing all our estimates on those numbers. We are basing our estimates on those numbers, and those numbers turned out to be true to the point that it is not even 2.3. It is more like 2.1, currently. It is even less than that.

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Mr. PERRY. Mr. Speaker, would the gentleman from Arizona confirm for the audience or explain what OASI and DI mean?

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Mr. PERRY. You lose your job from unemployment, but you get hurt and you can't work?

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Mr. PERRY. So you took $114 billion out of OASI, which is the big Social Security?

We took it out of that and put it into disability insurance because disability was going to be bankrupt while we stand here today?

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Mr. PERRY. So we lost 4 years. What caused losing 4 years?

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Mr. PERRY. Ten years.

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Mr. PERRY. I haven't seen any talk about that.

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Mr. PERRY. Carry on.

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Mr. PERRY. Indeed.

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Mr. PERRY. The only thing you have left to pay is from incoming revenues from taxes. So your benefits are decreased by that whatever that amount is at that time. So it probably fluctuates probably somewhere between 25 and 30 percent.

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Mr. PERRY. Many of your constituents hear, from time to time, whether it is the President, people on the other side--and, frankly, people on our side--say that we are reducing the deficits. They hear this.

If they don't come to your townhall meeting, they say: Well, the deficit is smaller, right? So that is good. What is all this hara-kiri about Social Security and debt. What is all the histrionics?

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Mr. PERRY. I don't think you can completely explain the green part of sequestration. As you can see, it moves above the red line on occasion about 2017.

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Mr. PERRY. We wanted to spend more money.

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Mr. PERRY. But the bigger point of this slide, if you will, is that even with sequestration, you can see that, first of all, it is not different from the normal program spending. It has absolutely nothing to do with the huge portion of spending which is mandatory that eclipses everything we do, regardless.

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Mr. PERRY. It is the only benefit of a weak economy.

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