Paygo Will Bring About Fiscal Discipline

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Mr. WELCH. Mr. Speaker, I'm here, too, to join in advocacy for the PAYGO legislation that is going to come before the House floor this week. PAYGO is what it sounds like. If we have a new program, we have to find a way to pay for it, either through cuts or revenues. If we have a proposed tax cut, we have to find a way to pay for it, either in a reduction in programs elsewhere or a shifting of priorities and spending.

It is a very simple, elemental approach. If you're going to buy something, you have to pay for it. Families know it, in their family budgets, they have to do it all of the time. And government really is no different. It is no different because in the end, if we borrow money, at some point we are going to have to pay it back. We have gotten into a habit in this Congress of not paying for things, in some cases, expenditure programs, and in other cases tax cuts.

We have had some back and forth this morning with our friends on the other side of the aisle, and without getting into the blame game, which doesn't get us anywhere, there is an irrefutable fact, and that is that in the past 8 years with the tax cuts, with Medicare part D that was not funded, with a war in Iraq and a war in Afghanistan on the credit card, we have gone from the largest surplus in the history of this country to the largest deficit in the history of this country.

What it means is that our kids and our grandkids are the ones who are going to have to pick up the tab. Aside from the fact that that is obviously unfair and none of us wants to pass the burden of debt for our spending on to others, it really is going to restrict what it is that generation can do to meet its own challenges to educate its kids, to provide health care to its kids and themselves and to provide for the national defense.

We have the capacity to impose on ourselves the same rule that families have to impose on themselves every month when they sit around the kitchen table and go over their checkbook and try to figure out how, at the end of the month, they are going to make the checkbook balance. And that is to accept the burden of the discipline of paying for our tax cut proposal or our spending proposal when we make the proposal.

Voters know that. They want fiscal responsibility. In fact, their concern about the deficit rightly is at the top of their agenda. We have had extraordinary circumstances here that have required extraordinary actions with the economy going off the cliff, with the stimulus spending and with the legacy of a war in Iraq and Afghanistan on the credit card.

We have restored truth in budgeting so that those two things, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, are now on the budget. So it is painful because we are seeing in black and white what the cost of those enterprises are, and we know that we are going to have to pay for them. We are not trying to hide it. We are being direct.

The American people are entitled to that candor, and they are entitled to have us respond by making certain that we, going forward, adopt pay-as-you-go principles. It is not just good in theory, and it is not just good for conservatives or liberals. It is good for everybody.

I'm a big supporter, I think most of us are, that in this country we achieve the goal of having all of our citizens covered by health care. Every citizen should be covered and have access to health insurance. Every citizen should help pay for it. And if you lose your job, you shouldn't lose your health care. The President has acknowledged that as worthy as that goal is, we must pay for it. And the health care bill that we are now considering has to be paid for. What a difference from what happened with the prescription drug program that was largely put on the credit card and it is not able to sustain itself or pay for itself.

One of the reasons it is so important to have PAYGO is that it imposes the discipline on us to kick the tires of a program. Health care is a great example. We need it. We have good health care in this country. But the cost is going up at two or three times the rate of inflation, two or three times the rate of profit growth, two or three times the rate of wage growth. So people are falling behind. The middle class is getting squeezed. They are facing higher co-pays and deductibles. By adopting PAYGO, it is forcing us to look at our delivery system and ask yourselves how can we reform the delivery of health care to make it more efficient and provide more value for less money?

In fact, there are examples after examples of how we have, in many cases, excess utilization. So this bill is going to be helpful to all of us. And it is very important that we pass this legislation.

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