Providing For Consideration Of Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act Of 2009
Statement
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Mr. CUELLAR. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to support this bill, H.R. 2920. I rise because there are many Americans who are living paycheck to paycheck, dollar to dollar.
As I traveled around my south Texas district from Laredo through the Rio Grande Valley, my constituents, like those around the country, are gathering around the kitchen tables to figure out how to make those hard financial decisions. They're making tough choices about which basic needs they can afford. Many live by a very simple principle. If you have $5, you spend $5. We should expect Congress to do the same.
So, today, I stand in support of the statutory pay-as-you-go legislation because it will rein in national spending and help reduce our national debt during these very difficult times.
If we return to the fiscal responsibility philosophy that we had in the 1990s when PAYGO spending created record budget surpluses, we would change our economy. Americans can't spend their money recklessly right now, and Congress shouldn't either. Our children deserve more, and the people in Texas and the Nation deserve better.
Today's consideration of PAYGO is a golden opportunity to start getting this country's bank account out of the red. It's time to stop the borrow-and-spend mentality. It's time to return to pay-as-you-go, especially as we consider the health care reform bill. It's important that we spend taxpayers' dollars wisely.
I've always been supportive of good government efforts to increase fiscal responsibility to make sure that we have an accountable and effective government. This is why the Blue Dogs have been supporting the performance-based budgeting bill to make sure that we have effective, accountable government. That increases government transparency and efficiency in spending.
Americans and Texans are doing their share to be fiscally responsible. Now it's time for Congress to do our part, and this is why we need to pass pay-as-you-go.
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Mr. CUELLAR. Sure. And again, thank you very much. I appreciate the comments of the gentleman from California, a good friend of mine. First, to answer this question, we have to look at history. When the PAYGO was implemented back in the 1990s, it expired in 2002. The majority at that time decided not to put it back again or reimplement it. We saw from history in early 2000 there was a surplus that we got. And I believe part of the reason was because we had a statutory pay-as-you-go provision. When this was let go, and it expired in 2002, you saw that the deficit--and again this deficit that you're talking about, and I'm concerned about it just like you are, but this deficit didn't occur on January 20 of this year. It is something that has been happening for the last 4 or 5 years.
So if I can just finish my thought, what we need to do is, I know that we have some differences, but I hope we can get both the Democrats and Republicans and both sides of the aisle working together to come up with a way that we can go ahead and stop this deficit. Because as you very well know, if I can just finish this, look, this is what we have. We have over $11 trillion in debt that we have right now. Forty percent of that is owned by foreign countries. And again, the gentleman from California, if you had a business, imagine what would happen if one day you woke up and your neighbor, your friendly competitor, suddenly owned 40 percent of your mortgage. That would put us in a very difficult situation. And this is what we are facing in this country.
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