Cut, Cap, and Balance Act of 2011
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. LANKFORD. We have two distinctly different views. And it's not just Republican or Democrat views. One group sees the impending crisis as whether we're going to vote to increase the debt ceiling and all the crisis is based around August 2. The other group sees the crisis as the debt itself.
How you see the crisis will affect your view of how you choose to solve it. If the problem is the uncertainty around just this vote, then we do whatever it takes to get past August 2 and the problem is solved.
If the problem is the debt, when we raise the ceiling, we will face a debt approaching $14 trillion with no strategy to pay off that debt. Our disaster is not averted. It has been accelerated.
As we know, just raising the debt limit does not solve the problem, as we've done that many times in the past. The economy that we have now is as a result of the actions that we've taken in the past to continually raise the debt ceiling over and over again with no plan to get out of it.
What if we raise the debt ceiling and agree to the President's oral plan that he has given of $14 trillion, whatever that plan may be?
From the best we understand, Timothy Geithner made the statement in June that the plan is $2 trillion in cuts over the next 10 years, $1 trillion in tax increases and $1 trillion in interest savings, whatever that means. If we accomplish that plan and do that and just raise the debt ceiling, we will then have a debt in 10 years of $24 trillion with still no plan to pay it off. That does not solve the debt crisis. That accelerates our debt crisis.
I have heard all day what a disaster it would be to balance our budget. Only in this room is it a disaster to balance the budget. I don't think Americans understand what we're talking about. I don't think they understand how out of touch we have really become that we would argue about balancing the budget. S&P and Moody's have both threatened to downgrade our debt, not because we're approaching August 2, but because we have no credible plan to ever pay this off.
Cut, Cap, and Balance gives us a credible framework from which, year after year, we will work to be able to resolve this debt, pay it down, and get back to balance.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source