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Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2009

Date: July 22, 2009
Location: Washington, DC
Issues: Government Budget and Spending


STATUTORY PAY-AS-YOU-GO ACT OF 2009 -- (House of Representatives - July 22, 2009)

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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of this legislation. On the day he was sworn in as President, President Obama inherited huge deficits and exploding debt in this country. The previous administration wanted to put everything on our national credit card and ask future generations to pay for it.

It's time to put an end to this, and this bill today is the beginning of the end of irresponsible spending. It's the end of sweeping our problems under the rug and saying we're going to put them off to another day. And we have seen the impact this kind of budget mechanism can have. We saw it in the 1990s, during which we had a PAYGO rule in place and we saw our deficits and debts go from record deficits to record surpluses. And when we abandon that, when we abandoned that fiscal discipline rule in 2002, we saw our Federal debt explode.

As we dig ourselves out of this economic ditch we find ourselves in, it is important that we put our economy on a long-term, sustainable basis, and this legislation is part of doing that. It will require that policies that result in revenue reduction or increased mandatory spending be offset over the next 5 and 10 years. That will require us to take a hard look at our national priorities. It will require us to look at the tradeoffs that we have to make, just like every family in America has to make those hard decisions. We say let's apply that rule to the United States Congress.

Unfortunately, as we saw from the last administration, there was a lot of talk but no action. Mr. Speaker, what this does is say this isn't just going to be a House rule. This is going to be a matter of the law of the land. And while it can never be a total substitute for our ability to muster the political will to get things done, history has been a clear guide that this helps us get the job done.

So I want to commend Leader Hoyer, Mr. Spratt and the others for bringing this important legislation to the floor. Let's finally say to our children and our grandchildren, We're going to take some responsibility. The buck stops here. Let's stop passing on our problems to the next generation.

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