Proposing A Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution

Floor Speech

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Mr. COSTA. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of this imperfect balanced budget amendment, and let me say why.

This week, the Congressional Budget Office released the annual Budget and Economic Outlook. It estimates that the trillion dollar annual deficits will return in only 2 years. This represents the largest deficit in 6 years, and is 84 percent of increased spending over last year.

Today, our national debt is over $21 trillion, and approximately, for each individual American, $174,000-plus per taxpayer. Outrageous. And that is simply the debt on the budget.

When accounting for off-budget debt, things like unfunded pension obligations, projected spending increases in the social safety net programs, baby boomers retirement from the workforce, and actual debt is actually much greater.

In order to make our budget sustainable, we must decrease deficits by $379 billion every year for the next 75 years. Sadly, we are not even coming close to this. In fact, we are going in the opposite direction.

History shows us that nations and empires usually fail when the cost of serving their debt exceeds the cost of defending their borders. If we continue down this path, America could be spending more on the debt interest payments than we do on our national defense within 5 years.

However, as serious as this issue is to the future of our country and future generations, no one can possibly take this vote seriously, and let me tell you why. We are voting on a balanced budget amendment because my Republican friends passed, on a party-line vote, a deficit finance tax cut that will result in $2.2 trillion in additional borrowing over the next 10 years. Therefore, this is nothing more than a fig leaf, and it is the height of hypocrisy.

What we should be doing is voting on a balanced budget amendment that Stephanie Murphy has put forth that protects commitments our Nation has made to current generations by protecting social safety net programs like Medicare and Social Security from cuts. But we are not allowed that choice, and yet, we must get our fiscal house in order.

I am one of 38 Members that voted for the Simpson-Bowles Act. Talk about lack of profiles in courage.

Let me make an observation, after being here 14 years, and that is that the rhetoric that we see in this debate and that we have seen in past debates on our budget deficit does not comport to the hard realities of choices that we have to make. It is that simple.

After 14 years in Congress, it is my view that this will only happen when Republicans and Democrats come together to make hard choices to agree on long-term revenues that are in line with our expenditures. It is not a difficult concept to understand. We have got to think of hard- line revenues that are going to be in line with our expenditures. But we are not willing to do that.

So this balanced budget amendment, while not perfect, I am going to vote for it because I think it is a step to keep the debate going and, ultimately, hopefully, will allow us to sit down in a bipartisan fashion to make the hard decisions that Americans expect us to make. That is why we have been sent here.

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