The Cost of Failure Exceeds the Price of Progress

Floor Speech

Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, ladies and gentlemen of this House, I am pleased to rise with my colleague and dear friend Barbara Lee to focus on an issue that all too frequently is ignored. I rise to speak as we are engaged in an extraordinarily important discussion, debate, and responsibility. That responsibility is to ensure that America pays its bills; that America's creditworthiness is not put at risk; and that an America which has incurred obligations meets those obligations to individuals and to others, as we have made policies that have cost money and it is now necessary for us to pay the bills that we have already incurred.

But as we engage in that debate and discussion, we must remember that there is in our country one child out of every five who is living in poverty, who is worried about proper food, proper housing, proper medical care. Children who are, in fact, at risk. We now in America, the richest nation on the face of the Earth, have the largest number of people living in poverty that we have had in over seven decades.

And so as we engage in this debate, it is important that we take this time to focus on those who all too often are invisible, who all too often are not the center of our discussion, who all too often are perceived to simply be those who will not matter at the voting booth.

Each of us in this House has a compass formed in many respects by our faith. My faith teaches me I have a responsibility to my God to reach out to the least among us to lift them up, to care for them, to clothe them, to feed them, to house them, to make sure that as a part of our American family, they are not forgotten. They are not by negligence driven more deeply into despair, unhealth, sickness, and a negative lifestyle which costs us all and costs those individuals.

I come from the State of Maryland, and I want to quote somebody you would think it may be unusual for me to quote, but I was elected to the State senate in 1966. Ted Agnew was elected Governor of our State in 1966, and he was inaugurated 2 weeks after I was sworn in as a member of the State senate at the age of 27. In his inaugural address he said: The cost of failure far exceeds the price of progress. What he meant by that, the failure to invest in the welfare of our people, as well as our infrastructure and the creation of jobs and the expansion of opportunity for our people, the failure to make those investments would in the long run cost us far more than the investments would cost us in the short run.

My colleagues, I suggest to you that our failure to invest in the welfare of all of our citizens will cost us far greater sums in the long run for the failure to invest in the short run.

And so I congratulate Barbara Lee from California for making sure that the least of us are not forgotten in this very important debate.

Do we need to bring down spending? We do. But one of the interesting facets of every report that has been issued in a bipartisan way, most recently by the so-called Gang of Six, or the Simpson-Bowles Commission, or the Senator Domenici-Alice Rivlin Commission--all had a central premise: Do not take actions that undermine the most vulnerable among us. Those were all bipartisan commissions.

I know my friends on the Republican side of the aisle who pride themselves on being the party of Lincoln understand Lincoln's message of healing and bringing us together and making sure that we lifted up our fellow citizens and cared for the sick and the homeless and for the young and, yes, for the old.

So as I said, I thank Chairwoman Lee, such a courageous and powerful voice on behalf of those who sometimes have no voice. I am pleased to join my voice to hers and hopefully to all 435 of us who have been given the privilege of serving in this body to raise our voices on this day on behalf of a Nation that has been perceived around the world as being a Nation of hope, of opportunity, of heart, and of soul. Let us reflect that in whatever way we go forward in ensuring the fiscal health of our Nation, both in the short term and in the long term. And understand that the health of our people physically, mentally, financially will be equally important to the health of our Nation.

I thank the gentlelady for leading this debate.

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