Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2010

Floor Speech

CONCURRENT RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET FOR FISCAL YEAR 2010 -- (House of Representatives - April 02, 2009)

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Mr. McCLINTOCK. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Madam Chair, I feel a moment of rare bipartisan agreement coming on. I noticed several of my friends on the left said that our problems are rooted in the fiscal mismanagement of the Bush administration. The gentleman from Virginia had a very good chart entitled Record Deterioration of the Budget Under Republican Administration.

I agree. There is no denying it, George W. Bush increased spending twice as fast as his predecessor Bill Clinton did. He turned a budget surplus into a chronic deficit. You are absolutely right.

So if we all agree that Bush spent too much and borrowed too much, then why in the world would we want to pursue the same folly on an even grander scale? Why would we take that Bush administration's unsustainable rate of spending growth and send it even higher? Why would we want to take that budget deficit, which is indefensible, and triple it?

If budgets that spend too much and borrow too much on the road to economic prosperity work, then why aren't we already enjoying a period of unprecedented economic expansion? The fact is, these policies don't work. And it doesn't matter whether the President is a Democrat or a Republican. They don't work, because government cannot inject a single dollar into the economy that it has not first taken out of that same economy. Those policies don't work for the same reason that you can't spend yourself rich or borrow your way out of debt or tax your way to prosperity.

If you want to know where these policies lead, just look to my home State of California. I have watched three governors, Republican and Democrat, do exactly what my friends on the left assure us is the road to prosperity. They increased spending at unsustainable rates, they ran up unprecedented debts, and they imposed crushing new taxes. And the result is that today California has been transformed from the Nation's Golden State to a state of collapse.

A record level of government spending has not produced prosperity; it has produced one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. Interest costs driven by years of borrowing are now eating into its budget. Its tax burden is producing a population exodus unknown since the days of the Dust Bowl. In fact, the State has spent so much that it has just imposed the biggest tax increase by any State in American history. California has borrowed so much that it is now in very real danger of defaulting on its obligations before the end of the summer. And, I am concerned that the President and many Democrats in Congress are making exactly the same mistake that the Bush administration made and that three California governors made, only on a much greater scale.

Madam Chair, I would suggest that, at a moment like this, perhaps it is time that we recognize the first law of holes: When you are in one, stop digging.

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