Energy And Water Development And Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2008

Floor Speech

ENERGY AND WATER DEVELOPMENT AND RELATED AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2008 -- (House of Representatives - June 19, 2007)

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. Chairman, I also rise to support the amendment of my colleague from Georgia, Mr. Westmoreland. I want to reiterate some of the comments that have already been made.

We simply have to start exercising fiscal discipline in this House. I often talk about how the Republicans missed the mark by overspending in the last few years and I talk about they, not we, because I came here as a fiscal conservative. I am even more of a fiscal conservative than I was when I first came to Congress, and I think most Members of my party have gotten up and admitted that we have spent too much money in the last few years. But most people now have seen the error of our ways, and we know that we have to start cutting, and we need to start right here. We talked about this last week, but we need to continue to talk about it.

We are on track for pretty soon 70 cents out of every dollar of Federal money going in to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, in the very, very near future. We do not need to take our country in that direction. We have got to start trimming budgets, and this is the place to start now.

If we do not do that, we are not only going to see a repeat of what the Democrats are bringing to us, the biggest tax increase in American history this year, we are going to continue to see that to the point where we are going to be taxing most of the money that Americans make, and we are going to destroy this country with that kind of an attitude.

Our economy is doing great because of the tax cuts that were instituted in 2001 and 2003, and the only way we can maintain that type of economy is for us to control spending. We don't have a revenue problem in this country. We have a spending problem. We need serious fundamental reform of our spending. We need fiscal discipline.

As my colleagues have said, we are dealing with spending at twice the rate of inflation. American families cannot stand that. They do not want us to continue spending at the level that we are spending. It is on track to be the largest spending increase that we have seen in a long, long time in this country.

We heard over and over again last year on the floor from the party that is now the majority party, then the minority party, that we were spending too much money. Here they are, expanding what was spent last year, and expanding it at a rate that is simply unsustainable. They obviously did not mean what they said last year when they said we were spending too much money.

It is a small cut. Again, I reiterate what my colleagues have said. We have been in Washington too long when we think of $18 million as a small cut. But as Everett Dirksen said many, many years ago, ``A million here and a million there, and pretty soon you are talking about real money.'' That is what we are doing.

Let me put Federal spending into some context for the American people.

The United States Federal Government is on track to spend more money next year than Germany's entire economy in the year 2005. Germany is and has been the third largest economy in the world for a long, long time. There are only two countries in the world with entire economies that are larger than the U.S. Government budget, the United States itself and Japan.

So it is important that we start cutting back, and we have to do it a little bit at a time. If there is anybody in this country who believes that throwing more money at a problem from the Federal Government's level solves problems, then they haven't looked at the statistics on our education system, they haven't looked at the statistics on what has happened with control of disasters. We know that simply throwing money at a problem does not solve the problem.

We need accountability, we need efficiency, and we really need to focus on those issues before we spend additional dollars.

I think that we do need more oversight of how Federal Government programs are run. But simply throwing more money at the problem won't create that oversight for us. We have to get down in the trenches, examine programs, see how money is being spent, and say what effect did you get from this money you are currently spending.

In most cases we can probably cut budgets and come out far ahead.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source