Recognizing the National Debt As A Threat to National Security

Floor Speech

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Mr. BRAUN. Madam President, I come to the floor this evening to talk about our national debt, and I will be introducing a resolution here in a moment.

Our national debt, to put it in perspective, had never been much before the year 2000. Cumulatively, it was $5 trillion. That is a lot of zeroes behind a 5. That is a lot. But that is what it took from the beginning of the country--most of it did occur from the 1960s to 1980. That is when we started doing deficits, but it really started to get to where they became entrenched in standard operating procedure in the year 2000.

We did put two wars on the credit card. In 2000 to 2008, we went up to $10 trillion--all of a sudden, a lot more zeroes, with an extra zero and a 1. From 2008 to 2016, we went from $10 trillion to $16 trillion.

Now it gets to be a little more repetitive. I got here--elected--in 2018. By 2018, we are adding $1 trillion a year. Stick with me here. That is $16 trillion, 17, 18. So I get here as a Senator, alarmed by that when you come from a place like Indiana and you ran a business for 37 years, and if you even did anything close to that, I guarantee you your line of credit wasn't going to get renewed.

Since then--and we had a pandemic in there--it has gotten to where we have put a burden on future generations that I never imagined. I didn't think we would see it in this short a period. Well, we did roughly put $4 trillion more on the books through the worst pandemic we ever had. I think many of us question whether that was necessary or not. We probably could have done better. But we had already gotten into the routine of maybe erring on the side of doing more rather than less.

Well, since then, we have gone into enterprising through government. When we were borrowing just a few years ago $1 trillion annually, now we are doing it every 6 months. If you are good at math out there, try taking interest rates, which now are around 5, 6, 7 percent, depending on how the government is borrowing it, start applying that to $34 trillion or $35 trillion, and the only blueprint we have for us would be from the Biden administration that puts us $52 trillion in debt in 10 years.

That is a burden on our kids and grandkids. They will have to figure out how to pay it off. All of us here seem to be unconcerned about it. I think it would be a little different if we were knocking things out of the park.

So those numbers never go away. Sooner or later, interest is going to--well, it is going to be sooner. I think next year, we are going to spend as much on our entire defense industry and budget as we will on interest. It doesn't take long to where that is going to amount to--in 3 to 4 years, 5--what we spend on all discretionary spending here, domestic and defense.

The government has grown from never being more than 20 percent of our GDP to now the new baseline is 25 percent of our GDP. Our economy has only grown maybe a couple percent a year. That is digging a hole deeper and deeper that--anyone who is in the category of being kids and grandkids out there, look out.

It is not going to be easy to get back to where you are actually paying your bills as you accumulate them. If we don't, it will be the same thing Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain had to go through when they fell off the wagon as small economies. We are the largest economy in the world. There is no good ending to it.

It is no more difficult than just not spending more than we take in. Any good manager would figure out really quickly how to get back in line. Your banker would never allow you to renew a line of credit if you didn't. Here, we have the printing press in the basement, and the credit card gets renewed each year. That is no excuse that you should keep performing poorly when you know what the end result is going to be.

It is even a threat to our national security. For instance, we spend $850 billion, roughly, on defense. China, our main geopolitical foe, spends less than a third of that. Russia, which causes all that trouble around the world, spends about $90 billion. It begs the question, why can't we do better when we are spending all that money? It is because we don't have any of the safeguards. We are not running it like the biggest business in the world; we are running it like kids with their hands in the cookie jar, and that is not a good business plan. It is unsustainable.

I am not going to repeat the numbers, but if you take this out 10 years, that is going to be a mountain that is so high to climb and so hard to tear down that it will be tough to do. We could do it easily by just not digging the hole any deeper, meaning freezing our spending and allocating our resources better, just like all States do. We choose not to do it. We need to start.

I am on the Budget Committee. We haven't done a budget in the Federal Government that we have adhered to in over two decades. Finally, we are going to have to start knuckling down and having discipline like everyone else does or it will end up like a chapter 11 does in the real world when you have not paid attention to the details, you borrow too much money, and you have a couple years to work it out with your creditors. Hopefully, we will never get to that.

I am introducing this resolution called Recognizing the National Debt as a Threat to National Security.

As in legislative session, and notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 600, which is at the desk.

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Mr. BRAUN. I know of no further debate on the measure.

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