A Policy That Doesn't Work

Floor Speech

A Policy That Doesn't Work -- (House of Representatives - Febarury 13, 2009)

Mr. McCLINTOCK. Madam Speaker, Benjamin Franklin warned us that "Passion governs, but she never governs wisely.''

As the Congress and the President rush to enact the latest in a long line of mega-spending bills, I think we would be well advised to spend a little more time on the dispassionate math of the matter.

The Congressional Budget Office issued a report last week that warns us, as reported by the Washington Times, that the spending bills may ``help in the short term but result in so much government debt that within a few years they would crowd out private investment, actually leading to a lower gross domestic product over the next 10 years than if the government had done nothing.''

We are already running a $1.2 trillion national deficit this year with a spending bill racing back toward this House to add another $800 billion on top of that.

Let's put that in perspective: a $2 trillion deficit, that is 150 times the size of the annual deficit that has brought the State of California to the brink of bankruptcy. That is $6,500 of new debt for every man, woman and child in the United States, $26,000 for an average family of four. And that is not a theoretical number. That family will have to repay that $26,000 plus interest from their future taxes just as surely as if it appeared at the bottom of their credit card statement this month.

This is all being done in the name of stimulating the economy, but the supporters of this policy have not have been able to cite a single example in all of recorded history where massive government spending has actually stimulated an economy. There are plenty of examples where it ruined economies and brought down great nations.

The supporters of this policy have not been able to explain how the government can inject a single dollar into the economy that it has not first taken out of that same economy. They have not been able to explain how we strengthen our economic future by leaving the next generation with an unprecedented debt that will take them decades to pay off.

What the President told us last night, and my friend from Texas said just a few moments ago, is that by spending another $800 billion, they can create or save up to 4 million jobs. That sounds good until you realize that comes to more than $200,000 a job by their own numbers. By their own numbers, we could literally send those 4 million lucky families a check for $100,000 and save half of what they plan to spend.

If this policy worked, we would already be enjoying a period of unprecedented economic expansion. The bailouts and spending and loan guarantees already issued now total $9.7 trillion. As Bloomberg pointed out this week, that is enough to pay off 90 percent of all of the home mortgages in America. Not 90 percent of the bad mortgages, 90 percent of all of the mortgages.

We have not seen prosperity from these policies because these policies don't work. They didn't work in Japan in the 1990s, as my friend from California just mentioned, they didn't work in America in the 1930s. The unemployment rate in 1939, after nearly a decade of New Deal spending, was the same as it was in 1931.

Madam Speaker, history tells us that bankrupt nations don't last very long. Before we can secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, the Nation's finances must first be solid. So I beg the majority to pause and consider carefully what they are doing. I beg the President to pause and consider what kind of legacy he wants to leave the Nation. And, I beg the American people, while there is still time, to rise up and to demand a return to fiscal sanity.

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