Department Of The Interior, Environment, And Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2008
Floor Speech
DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR, ENVIRONMENT, AND RELATED AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2008 -- (House of Representatives - June 27, 2007)
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Ms. FOXX. I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me.
I haven't been on the floor to hear much of the debate on this bill, but a couple of things have caught my attention. One is that the chairman said we don't want across-the-board cuts.
Well, as I understand, they don't want cuts to individual programs or specific programs either, so I guess that means we don't want cuts, period. I remember hearing the debate on this floor about raising the minimum wage, and that has resonated in my memory in relationship to the debate on not making any cuts for this bill also.
There were raving comments made about how people who were living on the minimum wage hadn't received an increase for years and years and years, and yet Members of Congress had received pay raises.
Well, it seems to me that if we're concerned about people who are getting minimum wage, we definitely should be concerned about increasing spending for this bill or any other government program, for that matter. We are raising spending by billions of dollars, and where is that money coming from? That money is coming from the very people that were supposed to be helping those people making the minimum wage.
In just 6 months, the new Democrat majority has passed or paved the way for $103.4 billion in increased spending.
Now, what that means is, again, that we are taking that money away from the American citizens. By doing that, they have raised the national debt limit by $850 billion, which they said they would never do, or $2,812 for every single man, woman and child alive in the United States today, the second largest increase in the national debt in American history, and the largest single tax increase in American history they have passed.
So we don't need to be doing this. We need to be helping average working Americans, by letting them keep more of the money. The government doesn't know how to spend your money better than you know how to spend it.
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