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Fiscal Responsibility

Floor Speech

By: Ed Case

Date: July 18, 2019

Location: Washington, DC

Issues: Economy and Fiscal

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Mr. CASE. Madam Speaker, I rise as a proud member of the Democratic Blue Dog Coalition.

For a quarter century, the Blue Dogs in Congress have focused on three missions: fiscal responsibility for our country, a strong national defense, and commonsense solutions to practical problems.

We are 27 proud Democrats with democratic values. Our individual views and votes on the broad range of issues that come before this Congress run the gamut from progressive to moderate, centrist, and beyond; but together, we believe that the best way forward for our country on all of these issues is an underlying focus on fiscal responsibility, a strong national defense, and commonsense solutions wherever they may be found to practical problems.

Today, I wish to focus on fiscal responsibility. I do so as co-chair with my colleague from Utah, Mr. McAdams, of the Blue Dog Task Force on Fiscal Responsibility and Government Reform.

Let me start by saying, unfortunately, and very directly that it is very arguable that at no point in our entire history have we operated our Federal Government in as fiscally irresponsible a manner as we are operating it today.

There are lots of indicia of this out there, but nowhere does this show up more directly and stare us straight in the face than our national debt. Let me say what that is.

Our national debt is exactly what it sounds like. It is the amount that our Federal Government--you--owe to everyone who has loaned us money to pay for government.

Why do we have to do that? Because we are not bringing into government the revenues that are sufficient to match and pay for what we are paying for out of expenses.

We are now operating with a chronic and exploding deficit, and we are borrowing with abandon to make up the difference.

This particular chart is taken from the Congressional Budget Office. You will not find a more nonpartisan, objective, and professional group anywhere studying our fiscal responsibilities, our fiscal status, and our budgets than the Congressional Budget Office. I encourage everybody to take a look at their materials at cbo.org. This is just one of their many publications, and it is a wealth of information:

CBO The Budget and Economic Outlook Fiscal Years 2019 to 2049.

They are not only responsible for what has happened today; they are responsible for taking a look at the long-term, as any one of us would want to do with our own budgets.

What this chart shows is outlays, or spending, on the top line and revenues on the bottom line. In this particular chart, we are matching outlays over time, and the timeframe here is about 15 years, against gross domestic product, the percentage of gross domestic product.

Why is that important? It is important because one could have outlays and revenues coming in, but the only way to match it up is, how much is the strength of your economy overall? It is kind of like asking yourself: Well, in my own household budget, what is my level of spending, what is my level of borrowing, what is my level of income as opposed to my overall financial situation?

So here we have the percentage of gross domestic product over on the left in the vertical axis, and down here, time.

We can clearly see here that as we look out over a long, long period of time, that if we continued on the way we are today, we would see massive continuing spread of the two lines between expenses on the top and revenues at the bottom.

To amplify the situation, when we take a look at where we are currently, 2019, that dotted line right over here, that is about $1 trillion, that gap, $1 trillion in 1 year of a deficit.

So as we can see very obviously, not only are we in a very difficult situation today, but if we do nothing about it, it will spread over time.

Now, what actually finances that difference? Debt. We go out and borrow it. It doesn't just arrive in the middle of the night in an unmarked bag. It didn't just grow on the tree outside. We are operating at a chronic and exploding deficit and borrowing to make up this difference.

I am a returnee to Congress. I served in Congress from 2002 to 2007, so I tend to match up my experiences then versus now. I had a 12-year absence in between, half a generation if you want to think about it.

When I left Congress in early 2007, our national debt stood at $9 trillion. Today, our national debt stands at $22 trillion.

By the way, if you want to have a harrowing view of something, take a look at usdebtclock.org and watch the numbers turn over about as rapidly as anything you can see.

What you can see from studying the debt over time is an incredible increase over here on the right side of this chart.

But $22.5 trillion today. Let's just think about that. That is $68,300 for each and every citizen of this country, $183,000 for each and every taxpayer. Really? 230 years in our country's history to get to a national debt of $9 trillion, but just 12 years later, increasing by 250 percent to $22.5 trillion?

Again, we can't just look at the absolute numbers, because they don't tell the full story. After all, if we had a thriving economy that was producing an incredible amount of money, some of these figures wouldn't make as much sense.

So let's, again, take the total debt against the total gross domestic product, again, just like any house or business would do. We can see here that if we chart total debt against GDP--again, on the far left side on the vertical axis, we have GDP--as a percent of GDP, and down here, we have a period that starts at the origins of our country and concludes in 2049, from the start of our country to 2049, you can see the peaks right here.

Obviously, our country was in bad shape at the beginning in the Revolutionary War and thereafter. We were just starting out as a country. And you can see, for example, the Civil War, this peak.

Wars are times when we have to borrow money. Wars are times that are very, very difficult for economies, and obviously our expenses are up and people have needs, and during that period, we borrow money. We always try, or have always tried, to pay it back down because we don't know when the next emergency will come along.

We can see another peak here, World War I. We see the Great Depression right here, the Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, which was financed with borrowing. And then, of course, the tragedy of World War II, the absolute peak of our debt versus our gross domestic product, right there.

And why not? Our world was at war. Our economy was in a shambles. We had to finance that war.

Not only did we finance that war, we financed the entire recovery of the world, the Marshall Plan, in so many ways. We rebuilt our cities. We rebuilt the national highway system. We incurred that largely through debt. This was the highest point of our debt to date.

We see, again, some peaks that were related to great recessions and downturns in our economy where we had to borrow for a little while, then we came back down. And then we came to the last 15 to 20 years.

Up until this point, we operated fairly responsibly. By 15 to 20 years, we abandoned fiscal responsibility and started down a road of accelerating debt, for the most part unrelated to wars, other than for Iraq and Afghanistan, which definitely had a consequence for our national debt, but mostly a result of a failure in this body and the administration to balance budgets as we went along.

Here we are in 2017, 2018, and 2019. What is scarier than anything else is the CBO's projection of where it is going over time: out the roof, straight up.

We can see that this is not a partisan issue. In this particular graph, the percent of GDP is over on the left axis, and the bottom vertical axis is over time. In more recent history, the postwar period by Presidencies, we have Democrats in blue and Republicans in red.

We see over here President Truman in the late 1940s had a high threshold of debt-to-GDP, a little over 100 percent. Then, of course, it came down after that as we recovered. It went up in the era of some of our Great Recessions and, of course, our wars.

Then, we had the period when we did the best, which was an evolution from President Clinton into President Bush, which was the last time we balanced our budget.

Then, there is that spike starting with President Bush through the last Presidency and, especially, off the current Presidency into an ascending column, which is a projection from the Congressional Budget Office.

These are scary projections because the CBO projects that if we do nothing, we will see our debt climb to around 144 percent of GDP within a couple of decades.

Where does that rank us in the world? After all, we have had other governments that have had high debt. We have had other governments that have collapsed. We have had other governments for which their budget problems have caught up with them. Let's take a look at that.

This chart shows the period projected from the current year out only 5 years. It asks the question: What is the growth in our debt-to-GDP as compared to the rest of the world? How fast are we growing in our debt versus the rest of the world?

Unfortunately, the line on the right is us. We project that our debt- to-GDP will grow 11 percent over the next couple of years.

The next line is Italy. We have Korea and Japan, but the rest of the world seems to be getting their growth under control. Some of these countries are recovering from recessions, but some of these countries just have sound economic practices.

The embarrassing thing about this chart, the scary thing about this chart, is that we are not the world's leader. We are the world's loser, in terms of controlling our national debt.

Why should we care about all of this? One of the questions asked sometimes is: Why does debt matter?

I think the first and foremost obvious answer is that debt costs something. It is not free. If we borrow money, we pay interest. That is what everybody who loans us money expects. They expect to be paid some interest. These interest payments accelerate rapidly in times of accelerating debt.

We see here a projection, again based on figures from the Congressional Budget Office, of interest spending over time, the next 10 years, in this particular case. We see that, today, we have interest of somewhere around $400 billion a year but accelerating at a very rapid rate over the next decade, up to close to $1 trillion a year.

The red line is a scenario that is very likely if we do not make some tough decisions. That gets us even higher.

This is the actual trend that we are looking at. That is a lot of money to be paying just for interest.

To make matters worse, try to compare that level of interest spending against some of our other spending.

In this particular chart, we see this line is our interest spending, kept relatively modest until recently but then accelerating very rapidly, as was indicated in my prior chart, to the levels out to 2029 that are truly scary. That is not the scary part, if that is not scary enough.

This line is our total spending on our children. What do we do to take care of the children of our country? That is our spending line. Interest is just crossing it right now. This is our total defense spending projected out over time with interest crossing over.

What this shows is that we are about to pay, in a very short period of time, if we don't do anything, far more money in basic interest on our national debt than we are spending on our children and our defense. That is an inexcusable situation for us to be in.

The first basic problem is that we crowd out spending for other Federal purposes, which forces us, by the way, to borrow more, which forces us to have higher debt, which forces us to pay more interest. Everybody who has been in a business or a personal situation knows this.

The second basic problem with that is why should we care about debt-- national security. Where does this money come from? Who is lending us this money?

Two-fifths of our interest payments go overseas, two-fifths of the people in this world who are loaning us money. Two-fifths of our total debt is loaned to us, basically, by other countries. Other countries, 26 percent.

This is the line that is scary: China, up to 7 percent now and growing. Japan, okay, fine, we welcome Japan loaning money to us. But on balance, I would rather the blue be the blue rather than owing the money to other countries because who knows what is going to happen over the next 10 or 20 years or generations.

This is, obviously, not just an issue of our own fiscal stability, but it is a question of national security.

Another question of national security is that we need this money in case we get into other situations in the world, hopefully not, but prepare for the situation where we may have to have massive increases in defense spending over the next generation.

These are areas where we have traditionally tried to pay down our debt so that we can borrow back up to finance these additional expenditures without destroying our economy. Yet, when we borrow in good times to finance even larger Federal spending, then we have very little safety net to be able to borrow in bad times.

That is not just a matter of budgetary stability. That is a matter of national security.

Finally, why should it matter? Economic damage. There is a school out there that is trying to justify more debt, which is largely not agreed to by most economists. Most economists agree that, over time, large levels of debt, large levels of interest payments, drive up basic interest rates. They drive up basic interest rates, and that is bad for the economy. They drive up inflation, and that is bad for the economy.

They lead to a situation where the markets out there--the people who are loaning us money, the people who are relying on the United States for its full faith and credit--start to doubt our basic fiscal solvency. They start to not only loan us money, but they start to charge us more interest, and that causes an economic problem.

Finally, it is just bad budgetary practice to skate too closely on thin ice.

This is why we should care: because our interest payments are crowding out spending; because it is a national security issue; and because, over time, it is an economic issue.

How did we get into this mess? Well, obviously, we are spending more than we are taking in. Our long-term deficit buildup and short-term tax reduction and spending increases are really the issue.

This chart is an illustration, again based on CBO information, of where our deficits are coming from today. When we are talking about the total amount of deficits closing in on $1 trillion, we see that absent recent legislation--we are talking about just the last 5 years or so-- we had a chronic deficit of close to $400 billion a year. That is pretty bad since, if we take $400 billion and times it by 5 years, all of a sudden, we are at $2 trillion of debt.

But, then, we made major mistakes from a fiscal responsibility perspective in the last few years.

First of all, we had tax extenders that were not paid for. We will get into that. We had tax credits, tax reductions, and tax rates that were extended without accounting on the other side for the spending.

We had a major tax bill, which is still debated in this Chamber as to whether it was the right idea or not. What is indisputable about that tax bill was that it drove incredibly increasing deficits and incredibly and rapidly increasing debt.

Then, finally, we had a budget agreement, last year, to raise the amount of spending. There is nothing wrong with raising the amount of spending, per se, if it is a public judgment and a policy judgment that that is the best thing for our country. What is wrong is to pretend that there is no consequence to our deficit, debt, and national fiscal policy.

What do we do about it?

By the way, I want to go back to that point for a second. We are not debating here whether our government should be bigger or smaller. We are not debating here whether taxes should be higher or lower. We can have that debate. It has been going on, after all, for 250 years and even before that back to the Colonies. We have always talked about how big government should or shouldn't be, how much we should or shouldn't spend through government. We just had that debate here on this floor today.

We have always talked about the overall level of taxes. Should they be higher? Should they be lower? Should we have high taxes to pay for spending? Should they be lower to generate economic growth? Those are good, solid policy decisions to be made.

That is not what we are talking about here. What we are talking about here is the fiscal result when we don't balance spending and revenues, the result when we don't balance spending and revenues.

We can choose to have high spending, but if we don't generate the revenue for that, then we are going to end up with incredible deficits and debt. We can choose to have lower taxes, but if we don't adjust the spending at the same time, we are going to end up with high deficits and debt. It just makes perfect sense.

That is all that we are talking about here. We are willing and able to have the debate over the size of government and taxes.

Again, within our Blue Dog Caucus, we have disagreements on that. But where we have centralization of agreement is in managing the consequence of that debate and having it be an honest debate, not a debate that pulls the wool over our fellow citizens' eyes on the consequences.

What do we do about it? Well, I think, first of all, we start talking about it again. It is really hard. Twenty years ago, in the great times when we actually did balance the budget in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, public sentiment was high on deficits and debt. People cared about this. People understood the risk.

Then, all of a sudden, politicians stopped talking about it. They did, on both sides of the aisle, what many of us do when faced with a major issue: We deny it. We don't want to acknowledge it. It is too much trouble. We don't want to say that when we cut taxes and don't adjust spending, there is a consequence for our deficit and the debt. We don't want to say the reverse of that. We want to tell everybody that everything is okay. After all, we can have our cake and eat it, too.

I don't want to go back to my district and say, well, I can't vote for a tax reduction because it is going to blow our deficit and debt.

This is an insidious situation. The consequences of deficits and debt are not apparent right up front. They don't catch up with us for a long time. But I think we all know, deep down, that we have a problem and that is not true.

And the second thing we have to do, at some point, is simply make a plan and implement it. And that is what our Democratic Blue Dog Coalition has done and will try to do going forward.

We have tried to come up with a blueprint for fiscal responsibility, which today, we endorsed and released. And these are a series of points that we believe need to be pursued in order to have some chance at fiscal responsibility and sustainability over time.

From that perspective, I am very pleased that I am joined today by my colleague from Utah (Mr. McAdams), my co-chair of the Blue Dog Task Force on Fiscal Responsibility and Government Reform, to share his views and to outline some of our agenda items.

I yield to the gentleman from Utah (Mr. McAdams).

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Mr. CASE. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman so much, and I am privileged to be his co-chair.

Would the gentleman engage me in a colloquy on a few of the issues that he touched on?

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Mr. CASE. I yield to the gentleman from Utah.

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Mr. CASE. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman. Let's talk about his proposed balanced budget amendment, by the way, of which I am a proud cosponsor.

Some people criticized the balanced budget amendment which would have to be ratified throughout our country, as an overly restrictive mechanism, especially in times of national emergency.

As the gentleman's balanced budget amendment is crafted, is there flexibility to borrow money and to deficit spend in times of genuine national need?

I yield to the gentleman from Utah.

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Mr. CASE. So we always have the ability to override the basic provisions with that balanced budget amendment in Congress, or where we believe that we do have to borrow that money. This is just a mechanism to introduce the same fiscal discipline that a well-run business or household has to follow?

I yield to the gentleman.

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Mr. CASE. As, by the way, is the case with 49 out of 50 of our States, who either have a similar balanced budget amendment in their constitution or by statute.

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Mr. CASE. Madam Speaker, the gentleman made reference to the fact that he was a mayor, and I made the comment to the gentleman once, and I believe it, that of all of the public officials I have ever worked with throughout the country, I think mayors understand fiscal responsibility the best.

The gentleman made reference to the fact that he functioned under a balanced budget as a mayor. Was there any magic to that? How did the gentleman do that? He had a requirement to do that, so what did he do?

I yield to the gentleman from Utah.

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Mr. CASE. Madam Speaker, so to that point, my experience in Hawaii, where we have had a balanced budget for a long time--and I was a State legislator--so I had knock-down, drag-out fights over all this kind of stuff, whether it be to increase spending, or tax reductions, or tax increases. But it was always against the backdrop that it had to balance.

My sense was always that the folks that we represented understood that that presented us with a series of tough choices, and they understood that in the big picture, the tough choices that we had to make as a result of a balanced budget, were for the better, the overall, long-term, big picture fiscal health, economic health and social health of Hawaii.

Did the gentleman have that experience in Utah?

I yield to the gentleman from Utah.

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Mr. CASE. I think what the gentleman is saying in a very gracious Utah way is that the lack of a balanced budget where we always have the recourse to just borrow money and kick some cans down the road disincentivizes the efficient and effective expenditure of government funds, of taxpayer funds. After all, if there is waste in that expenditure, there is a safety valve there, whereas a balanced budget drives a certain discipline.

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Mr. CASE. One other point that the gentleman made that I think bears further discussion is the gentleman's reference to paygo. Of course, we throw ``paygo'' around here all the time. Sometimes, people's eyes kind of blank out when we talk about paygo.

Can the gentleman talk a little bit more about the simplistic and basic approach of paygo? What does it mean? What is its effect on the work that we do?