Further Continuing Appropriations Amendments, 2011
Floor Speech
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Mr. HOYER. I thank the gentleman for yielding.
I have now heard and watched on television and I have been on the floor with two members from Georgia, both of whom are brand new to this body who were talking about the history. Well, I want to tell my friend from Georgia a little bit of history. I have been here 30 years. I have served some 20 of those years under Republican Presidents. Every one of them has run a deficit of $100 billion or more. In fact, during that cumulative period of 30 years, notwithstanding the Obama administration, and I will discuss that in a second, Mr. Reagan, Mr. Bush I, and Mr. Bush II ran deficits of over $6 trillion that they signed the bills to spend. Over $6 trillion. Bill Clinton was President for 8 years. The last 4 years, we didn't raise the debt at all, unlike every one of the Republican administrations, where we raised it on a regular basis. Not at all during the last administration, the last 4 years of Mr. Clinton's administration, and he ran--the only President in your lifetime, and very frankly mine, and I may be twice as old as you are--a $62.9 billion surplus. Look it up. No argument.
But let me say something. Irrespective of who is responsible, we are responsible for fixing it. Republicans and Democrats. The American people know that we have a crisis confronting us. They know there is no option other than to deal with this realistically. I would call everybody's attention in this body--Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservatives--to an article written by David Brooks today in The New York Times. Read it. Read it. David Brooks is a conservative columnist of the New York Times. We all ought to read this and take it to heart. I called it to my caucus' attention this morning.
Our deep debt is a serious danger to our economy, to our future, and our children's opportunities. The American people want us to bring the debt down. They said so very loudly. And I doubt there is a Member who disagrees.
Democrats believe that spending cuts are part of the solution. Let there be no mistake. We need to cut spending, but we also believe that those cuts must be smart and targeted, not pegged to an arbitrary number.
One of your staffers, when you put the Pledge to America, came forth with a figure of $100 billion. That's a nice round figure; $100 billion sounds good. It's good PR. It's good spin--$100 billion. Read David Brooks. No analysis was given to that figure. No hearings were held on that figure. Nobody could testify on the cuts that were proposed to reach that figure.
We have to cut the spending. We can do without some spending, not the vital investments, however, that are helping to grow our economy, that are helping our private sector innovate and creating the jobs of the future.
During the Clinton administration, I will tell my young friend from Georgia there were 22 million new jobs. During the Bush administration, we lost 8 million jobs. A 30 million job turnaround. That's why there was so much spending of which Mr. Rogers spoke. And $700 billion of that, of course, was asked for by the Bush Presidency, Secretary Paulson and Mr. Bernanke, so that we didn't fall into a depression for the first time since Herbert Hoover. This President has been trying to bring us out and, frankly, is succeeding.
Unfortunately, Republicans passed a spending bill full of shortsighted and indiscriminate cuts. Do we need cuts? Yes. Do we need shortsighted and indiscriminate cuts? No. Just over a week ago, you would cut billions in energy and medical research, kick 200,000 children out of Head Start, make college more expensive, and stop 21st-century infrastructure projects in 40 States. That's what Mr. Zandi is talking about. That's what Goldman Sachs is talking about. Cuts like these could cripple America's competitiveness and job growth.
According to Moody's Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi, who advised Senator McCain's Presidential campaign, Republicans' cuts would cost America a total of 700,000 jobs. The Economic Policy Institute puts it at 800,000.
Rather than such job-destroying policies, both of us, both parties, need to come together and reason together. Frankly, the American public doesn't care who works with whom. They just want it to work. This is no way to fund the largest enterprise in the world--on 14-day cycles. The gentleman criticized us for doing it, and we should have been criticized.
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Mr. HOYER. Let me tell my friend what he didn't mention: One of the reasons we did it was that we couldn't get 60 votes in the United States Senate in order to move a bill forward.
Keeping our government running is vital to our economy. None of us should want to shut down the government. It is also vital to the millions who rely on government every day. The sooner we can agree on a long-term package of smart cuts, not reckless, arbitrary, job-destroying cuts, the sooner we can stop funding the government in disruptive 2-week increments. The gentleman was correct that we ought not to do that. We need to pass a 7-month funding so that government and all who rely on the government, who work for the government, and who have contracts with the government can rely on some certainty.
You've talked a lot about certainty on your side of the aisle. You're absolutely right, we need certainty. The business community needs certainty. Individuals need certainty, and the government needs certainty.
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Mr. HOYER. Rather than passing 2-week continuing resolutions, I urge Republicans and Democrats to work together on a long-term solution--in this case, ``long term'' is 7 months--to reduce spending, to try to balance our budget, and to try to bring rationality to this process. We cannot, my friends on the Republican side of the aisle and the Democratic side of the aisle, continue to look at 15 percent of the budget and expect us to get to where we need to be from where we now are.
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