Balanced Budget Amendment
Floor Speech
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Mr. LANKFORD. Thank you. I'm honored to get a chance to join in this conversation, which is really a conversation about a topic that's a very big deal to a lot of people.
I was 18 years old, and I remember sitting down with my mom, working through how to be able to fill out the register on a checkbook and how to be able to balance it because I'm getting ready to leave for college, and it becomes an essential characteristic of people to be able to handle their finances when they walk away to school. I can remember well sitting there and walking through money in/money out, all of that process.
It's such a simple process for us, so simple that, when I talk to people back home in my district in Oklahoma--Republicans or Democrats--and I say, ``What is your opinion on a balanced budget amendment?'' it's that this is not at partisan issue. Just flat out, when we get away from programs, when we get away from all the ideas and say, ``Should we balance our budget every year? Should we live in balance?'' I run into people who say, ``Yes, we need to balance our budget.'' When we get into conversations about the language, about exclusions, about all those things, those are legitimate conversations that I think we should have with the American people; but in reality, they come back to the same thing, that we should balance our budget.
Now, I've seen statistics. As high as 80 percent of the American people are interested in having a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, and I think there are multiple reasons for that. Some of them are fiscal. If I went to the American people and I said, ``I could provide to the American people in our budget for social programs, for tasks, for agencies, for all of our entitlement programs $220 billion more a year immediately into our Federal budget,'' everyone would say, ``Great. How do we do that?''
I would say, we catch up on our budget and stop paying interest. Currently, we're paying $220 billion a year just in interest payments. Can you imagine what we could do with $220 billion more in our budget if we didn't have such a large debt that we're having to maintain with so much interest?
The other side of that is, this debt is not forever. I interact with people all the time, and they will say words like sustainable, the debt is not sustainable, the debt is not sustainable. When I ask people, what does that mean to you to say the debt is not sustainable, very often they will just hesitate, and they will say, I think it just means we can't do this forever. And I would smile and say, I completely agree, we can't just keep borrowing this forever.
But let me tell you what it means to me in this. At any given time in the world, there is only so much money at that exact moment--now, we know that wealth shrinks and grows over time as investment happens, but at any one instant in the world there is only so much money. And of that money that's there, there is only so much that is actually invested, whether that be in business or in bonds or in whatever it may be. You take that investment pie worldwide, and you've got a portion of it that's going to growing businesses, starting new businesses, investing in markets, and then you've got another group of sovereign debt that is actually paying for countries and their debt. There is only so much money that can be invested in a moment. And at some point we start, as a country, taking on more and more money, which we're pulling out of the markets, and we're actually slowing down our economy by requiring more and more money to come to us to pay for our debt. So at some point we've got to stand up as a Nation and say, if we continue taking on this debt, we are purposefully killing the worldwide economy because we're taking money out of circulation, investment and pulling it into us. Forty-nine States have some sort of structure for a balanced budget. We should do that as a Federal Government. It is a commonsense thing.
Now, again, we can come back and talk about what the language is. I'm a firm believer that no party owns the United States Constitution; that is by the American people. So it should be Republicans and Democrats together, sitting down in a commonsense way, both the House and the Senate, and saying we agree, we need to get around this, this is out of hand. So let's start working on the language on it together.
So that becomes a key issue, but it sets up a couple of things that I think are really important. Number one is, it actually sets up deadlines. I have noticed as a freshman in this town that there are very few deadlines that ever occur here. Even when there is a budget requirement that the House and the Senate both have to do a budget each year, we just reject that and don't do it, and we'll do continuing resolutions and things. We don't like doing deadlines because it requires difficult decisions. A balanced budget amendment to the Constitution creates a moment that we have to actually focus in on the fiscal house and force us into those tough decisions.
It also creates a parameter that protects future generations. I am a firm believer that the reason we still have the freedom of religion in the United States is because it is in the United States Constitution. The reason we still have freedom of speech is because it is in the United States Constitution. And we all know that so many people in politics do not like what's written about them in the press, and many times in politics they push back on the press and try to limit the press. But we still have a free press because that is guaranteed in the United States Constitution. If we added in a balanced budget requirement for the Federal Government, it would give to our posterity, for centuries to come, the gift of a parent in the legislative room to say we are going to have a balanced budget, we are going to honor this. And that $220 billion a year that we've been throwing around and wasting on our interest would actually come back to reinvest into our economy. It's the right thing for us to do. It will require difficult decisions, I'm very aware, but it is absolutely the right thing to do.
I am so grateful for the gentleman from Arizona for leading a conversation on the House floor on this very important topic, because in the months to come we're encouraging all of America, around kitchen tables, around the workplace, playing around and watching football--which I'm very grateful is coming in the next couple of weeks to finally start football season again--around these gatherings of people to start having the conversation, do you think our Nation should have a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution? Let's initiate a conversation--I think I know where the American people already are, but let's give it a shot and find out for sure where their legislators are and so we can get that back out to the States and say, where are you, and where are we as a Nation?
And so I appreciate so much the gentleman from Arizona.
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