Preventing Paygo Sequestration

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, this bill is just the first taste of a bitter brew concocted by those who pushed through $1.9 trillion of pure deficit spending last week.

Now, this measure involves our paygo rules. You remember paygo. The current version dates to 2010. In those days everyone was worried about a $1.3 trillion deficit and $13 trillion of national debt. Isn't that adorable?

Paygo requires across-the-board spending cuts to offset any bill that spends money we don't have. And we just spent a lot of money we don't have. As paygo works, the first installment payment for this Biden binge is $345 billion of spending cuts every year for the next 5 years, and that includes $52 billion in paygo and BCA cuts to Medicare, which is expected to go broke in 2024 as it is. Now, that is just to pay for the party the Democrats had the other day. So it is time to pay for it.

How do you deal with a bill like that? Well, it is pretty simple: Just forget about it. Just wipe it off the books and start planning the next trillion-dollar spending spree. In fairness, that is how both parties have addressed paygo since we passed it. And the net result is the deficit has nearly tripled and the debt has more than doubled in less than a decade.

At least the Republican tax cuts in 2017 helped produce such a strong economic recovery that our revenues went up. They didn't go down. Now, that should have reduced our deficit, but our failure to control spending instead drove that deficit still higher. In short, it is the spending, stupid.

No nation has ever spent, taxed, and borrowed its way to prosperity, but many have spent, taxed, and borrowed themselves into bankruptcy and ruin. History warns us that nations that bankrupt themselves aren't around very long, because before you can provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare, you first have to be able to pay for them.

Excessive debt saps the credit of a nation that is its lifeline in times of genuine peril. It consumes the future prosperity of the nation as interest costs swell. It saps the economic vitality of our Nation by crowding out capital that would otherwise be available to consumers and home buyers and businesses. It robs the currency of its value, pilfering the Nation's savings and their pensions. It alienates capital markets until interest rates rise and interest costs balloon into a debt spiral. Once this starts, there is no way to stop it until the whole house of cards crashes down.

Do you know want to know what that looks likes? It looks a lot like Venezuela.

In the spring of 1945, there was serious concern whether we could continue the war into 1946. Bond sales were failing miserably, war taxes, spending, borrowing, and inflation had hollowed out our economy, and the Nation's credit was nearing exhaustion. Now consider this: we are carrying a larger percentage of debt today than we were at the very end of World War II, and I fear how we could respond to a similar sustained national threat today.

When a colleague told the great economist, Adam Smith, that a British defeat would be the ruin of the nation, Smith calmly observed: ``Be assured, my young friend, that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.''

But as I look at the unprecedented and unsustainable debt that these policies are producing, I can't avoid a sense of foreboding that our Nation is fast running out of ruin, and that a terrible day of reckoning is coming.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source