The Federal Budget And The Economy

Floor Speech

Well, I thank the gentleman from Missouri for yielding. Yes, this presents a particularly interesting conundrum that we do have here. The President has talked about how our most important element is to create jobs. And it is. For our people we need jobs. I recognize, though, that much of what we have in this budget that you have already mentioned does not create jobs. It actually has a stifling impact on jobs.

Some things, though, in which jobs are our responsibility, we also have put a stifling influence just on the decisions we make. This budget is $3.8 trillion. That's a whole lot of money. It's $1.6 trillion more than we have. That's a whole lot of money that's going to go there. And in every one of the budgets that takes place it's about choices. In our own families we do the same thing. We have certain things we want and certain things we need. My problem with this budget right now, specifically in the areas that I am deeply concerned, is that we have a lot of stuff in here that we want that's being funded and a lot of things that we need that is not being funded.

One of the few constitutional responsibilities we have in this country is defense. Last year, you and I were down here with others very frequently talking about missile defense. It is essential for this country. We cut missile defense. Once again, it was about prioritization. I think and I believe you thought we put our priorities in the wrong place. And you don't build a missile without people. When we cut our missile defense program, we took jobs away.

Unfortunately, in this particular budget, once again we go after another kind of missile program and have decided to take it out. What it simply means is this budget decides to go after NASA and take away the Constellation program and specifically the Ares 1 rocket. Now I hate to say this, but Time magazine determined what were the Fifty Best Inventions of the Year. And the number one invention was the Ares rocket. This is our process to replace the space shuttle. This is how we are moving into space exploration in the future. I hate to say this. I think space exploration is one of the core responsibilities of the Federal Government.

But in taking this out what you are doing is cutting 7,000 jobs nationwide of people involved in space, engineering, math, and science, which--once again, the President wants to encourage kids to study and to go into engineering, science, and math, but we don't have any responsibility of trying to encourage that on the real side. And where the problem comes is the people that make the motors for these rockets make the motors for our missiles.

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