The Great Pretender

THE GREAT PRETENDER -- (House of Representatives - February 03, 2004)

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to the order of the House of January 20, 2004, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer) is recognized during morning hour debates for 5 minutes.

Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, when President Bush took office, he inherited the longest peacetime expansion of the American economy in history. He inherited 4 consecutive years of budget surpluses, the first time that had happened in over 80 years. And he inherited a projected 10-year budget surplus of $5.6 trillion.

In March of 2001, President Bush boldly promised the American people, and I quote, "We can proceed with tax relief without fear of budget deficits, even if the economy softens. Projections for the surplus in my budget are cautious and conservative." That is what the President said.

Well, Mr. Speaker, it should now be clear to the American people that the originator of the term "fuzzy math" has become its foremost practitioner. Any doubt about that was erased yesterday with the submission of the President's fiscal 2005 budget, a budget that threatens to plunge us into an economic abyss for years to come.

The President's failed economic policies, adopted by this House and Senate, are the equivalent of fiscal child abuse because they would force our children to pay our bills for decades to come and force our grandchildren to pay our bills for decades to come. His budget projects a record deficit this year. Fiscal conservatives hear me: $521 billion in deficits this year, $.5 trillion, this on the heels of last year's deficits of $375 billion. And next year the administration projects a deficit of $364 billion.

But even that figure is not accurate, and the President ought to know it and, in my opinion, does know it. It fails to include the cost of additional military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Director of the Office of Management and Budget revealed yesterday that the administration may ask for another $50 billion for our war efforts. It failed to provide a long-term solution for the working class time bomb, the alternative minimum tax, and it failed to include the cost of initiatives such as the administration's ill-conceived Social Security privatization plan.

The fact is the President has no plan to dig our Nation out of the fiscal mess that his policies and the policies of this Congress have created. He pretends that he will halve the deficit by 2009, but almost all the deficit reduction in his budget is attributable to growth in the Social Security Trust Fund. I ask my Republican colleagues: Where have you hidden the Social Security lockbox?

Furthermore, the President pretends that reining in nondefense discretionary spending will return the budget to balance. The No Child Left Behind Act is still underfunded by $9 billion plus. The President would slash funding for the environment and from construction on our Nation's highways. His budget even cuts funding for veterans medical care and the Assistance to Firefighters Grant program.

My good friend, the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young), has recognized the fallacy of trying to balance the budget by cutting discretionary spending. Yesterday, Chairman Young said, and I quote, "No one should expect significant deficit reduction as a result of austere nondefense discretionary spending limits. The numbers simply do not add up. Nondefense discretionary represents less than 20 percent, some 18 percent of the Federal budget, and freezing this spending reduces the deficit by a marginal amount."

In fact, if we reduced and eliminated all of discretionary funding, all funding for this Congress, all funding for the executive department, all funding for NIH, all funding for CDC, all funding for CIA, all funding for FBI, and all funding for all other nondefense discretionary spending, we would not balance the budget.

But never fear, while the President proposes draconian and unrealistic spending cuts, he continues to demand that the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 be made permanent at a cost of $1 trillion over 10 years. Who is going to pay that? Our children and our grandchildren. Because this generation refuses to pay for what it is buying.

And here is the kicker: The President refuses to offer any explanation of how he plans to pay for them. None. Zero. Nada. Even some of our Republican friends are starting to flinch at this administration's fiscal recklessness. Hopefully, they will vote that way as well, it will not be just rhetorical. And some of them, by the way, do vote that way, and I respect them for that.

On Friday, and the majority leader is sitting here on the floor pretending to ignore my compelling remarks, on Friday, former majority leader Dick Armey was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as stating, and this is Dick Armey, the majority leader immediately preceding our present majority leader, and he said, "I'm sitting here and I'm upset about the deficit and I'm upset about spending. There's no way I can pin that on the Democrats. Republicans own the town now." That was Dick Armey, former Republican majority leader.

I implore every one of my colleagues to reject the President's budget out of hand and to face the fiscal train wreck bearing down on the American people with honesty and candor. Some do. Most do not. When it comes to masquerading as a fiscal conservative, the President deserves an academy award.

We do not have the luxury of pretending, my colleagues, any longer that his failed policies are working. Let us hope that all of us have the intellectual honesty and the courage to face this issue and come together. It will be tough. It will be wrenching in many respects. But it will be the right thing to do for our country. It will be the right thing to do for our children. It will be the right thing to do for America.

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