Government Spending
Floor Speech
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Mr. BUCHANAN. I would like to thank the gentleman from Virginia for his enormous leadership.
As I agree with all of my colleagues, everybody has a different reason why they run for Congress. I have been in business for 30 years. Your first term, my second term. But that was my number one issue by far is these runaway deficits. And since I came in 2006, we've got $1.4 trillion. We've picked up another $2 trillion. Another 20 percent we've added to the deficit in the last 3 years. It's crazy.
The numbers today were over $12 trillion in debt. And with the budget the Democrats have presented in terms of going forward, they're talking about close to $20 trillion in the next 6, 7, 8 years. If you took the number of 5 percent cost of money on $20 trillion, it's a trillion dollars a year before you pay $1 for Social Security, Medicare, or anything. It's unbelievable.
This past year, the deficit was $1.4 trillion. As bad as it's been in the past, if you look at $300 billion, $400 billion is way too much. We should have been balancing those budgets. But $1.4 trillion, that is three times larger, plus, than any other deficit from that standpoint.
The last 50 years--and what really motivated me is why this has to be a bipartisan effort. In the last 50 years, I think--and you might know exactly the number, but I think it's only been about four or five or six times we balanced the budget. Forty-four times we haven't. We're incapable of balancing this budget, with the exception of getting a constitutional balanced budget amendment.
Forty-nine out of fifty Governors have to balance their budgets. Our city in Sarasota, Florida, or Manatee County, they've got to balance their budgets. Families have to balance their budgets. Businesses can't continue to spend.
I grew up in Detroit down the street from General Motors. If you look at the most powerful, successful corporation in the world, made a lot of commitments to a lot of folks who used to be 30 and out for the blue collar worker. My brother was there when he was 18. Many of them looked at 30 and out. But now they've reneged on all of the benefits and everything else. We've got to stop it. It's crazy, and we've got to bring some common sense to this whole process.
That is why we've got to have a constitutional balanced budget amendment. As my colleague mentioned, we were one vote short in '94, and we've got to go back in that effort. It defies logic why we don't do that.
The other thing, I came here and I want to be the best I can, bipartisan. The Democrats talked about PAYGO. That's a joke. PAYGO, it sounded good. You know, it's better than nothing, I thought. But we ran our largest deficit ever--$1.4 trillion with PAYGO. You look at now we want to have a commission and talk about that on a bipartisan basis. Again, they won't get it done. I have absolutely no confidence that that is going to get done.
We need a constitutional balanced budget amendment that says if you take in $3 trillion--that is what we took in my first year in Congress--you don't spend more than that, $3 trillion. As we said, 49 out of 50 Governors can't spend more than they take in. In the State of Florida, our budget was $72 trillion a few years ago. It's down to $62 trillion. They've had to make the adjustments. They've had to find the efficiencies. And we've got to do the same thing here.
I tell people--I think it was roughly a year ago you might remember we had a bill here, Aid to Africa. We were giving them $15 billion a year. And the thought was
in this environment, same environment we're in now, tough year, families are making cuts, businesses are making cuts, you think they might cut it 10 percent or maybe add 2 percent. We're a very generous Nation. They went from $15 billion to $50 billion. And I think every Democrat voted for it and half the Republicans.
So my thought was, Okay, here we go. We're going to go borrow the money from China. Taxpayers are going to pay interest on that for a long time, and our children and grandchildren. And it's going to go to Africa, and God only knows where it goes when it gets to Africa. I thought to myself, Why don't we have China give it to Africa? Why do we have to be the middleman in that process?
But the bottom line is we've got to recommit ourselves. I think what happened on Tuesday a week ago in Massachusetts, spending and runaway spending has got so many people in my district and I think across the country, they realize that we defy common sense up here. That's why they're so angry and mad. There are a lot of other issues, but I think the top of this is they're concerned about what we leave our children and grandchildren.
I was in Bradenton, Florida, at a town hall meeting. A gentleman stood up, 63 years old. He said, Congressman, I have never been to one of these. I don't get involved politically in this. But he said, I have five children and I think 13 grandchildren. It's the first time in my life--I've been a small business man all my life. I am very, very concerned about where we're at and where we're going. I feel like we're heading towards bankruptcy, what I see, what I sense, my business background. He said, We can't continue to keep spending.
And I share that feeling. I know that my colleagues all share that feeling today, and this is the most important issue. It's the reason I came in 2006. I have two children in their mid-twenties. Every generation has left it better for the next generation. I don't want our generation to be the first generation that doesn't do this. And we need to come together in a bipartisan basis and do what's best, in the best interest of not only Americans but America.
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