Addressing Fiscal Deficits

Floor Speech

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Mr. KHANNA. Mr. Speaker, I am here on behalf of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and I want to just state our opposition to the balanced budget amendment.

It is worth reviewing the history on this topic. When President Bill Clinton left office, he left this country with surpluses. He had reversed the policy of Reagan economics, which had some of the largest structural deficits in the 1980s and during the first President Bush's term.

And then we went from record surpluses back to deficits. And what was the reason for those deficits? There were two very simple reasons. One, we made a strategic mistake in Iraq and spent trillions of dollars, which even President Trump has acknowledged was a blunder, and that ballooned the deficit. And secondly, we made a decision to provide tax cuts for the very wealthiest Americans.

Now, the Democrats supported the tax cut for the middle class, for folks making $50- to $75,000, but we said you don't need to provide tax cuts for people making $1 million, $500,000; you don't need to provide tax cuts for those who are already paying capital gains tax rates at 20 percent and don't need additional tax breaks.

So those two decisions, the intervention overseas and our continued interventions overseas and these extraordinary tax breaks for the very wealthy, have led us to the deficits that we have today, have led us to the $20 trillion debt.

No one wants that kind of debt. We don't want to see interest rates continue to go up and crowd out private investment. We don't want to see people's savings lose value. But the solution to that is not a gimmick of a balanced budget amendment where the Republicans have doubled down on more tax cuts for the very wealthy, where they haven't stopped our interventionism abroad. We still actually have escalation in Afghanistan, escalation in Iraq, escalation around the world, in contradiction to what this President promised on the campaign where he said that he would focus on developing our domestic economy and stop the interventionism, and we just have symbolic votes for a balanced budget amendment.

The question is how? How can you vote for extraordinary tax cuts? How can you vote for more overseas interventionism? How can you vote for huge spending bills and then just say you are for a balanced budget amendment? The math just doesn't work.

And so what Democrats have said is, instead of having a balanced budget amendment, instead of constraining our policy or economic policy to spend more at times of war or times of recession--which, by the way, Roosevelt did, which Woodrow Wilson did, what many of our Presidents did--that what we ought to do is have sensible government, that we ought to stop the foreign interventionism, we ought to repeal these tax breaks and giveaways to the very wealthy, and instead we ought to invest in the middle class, invest in our education, invest in our infrastructure, invest in our schools, invest in new technology that will grow the economy.

That is how you reduce the structural deficits. But, by the way, this is not a theoretical debate, because Bill Clinton showed that when you have that kind of ``people's first'' economic policy, you left this country with surpluses, and the trickle-down Reaganomics has always left this country with deficits.

It is not enough to just vote for balanced budget amendments while piling on debt. A far more responsible policy would be to end the foreign interventionism, to repeal these massive giveaways to the wealthy, and to invest in the middle class.

That is why my colleagues and I opposed the balanced budget amendment. That is why we have offered the Congressional Progressive People's Budget that will lead to greater economic growth than anything that the President has proposed, and that will also reduce our Nation's debt.

Mr. Speaker, I have no other speakers, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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