Debt Limit

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. I would like to bring that up because the legislation that we considered earlier today had a provision that required a constitutional amendment that is mislabeled. It is called the Balanced Budget Amendment.

Well, if you look at the provisions of the bill, not just the title, the provisions, you will see that it requires a three-fifths vote to pass a budget that is not in balance. Every budget that we have considered for the last 9 years and every budget that we will consider for the foreseeable future will be unbalanced in the first year. So all you've done is increase the threshold for any budget to be balanced.

The Republican Study Committee budget, which is probably the most conservative budget in terms of spending on the table, other budgets would probably cut the deficit just as much, but all of those severe deficit reduction bills would require a three-fifths vote.

Now remember, when the Clinton budget passed, it passed by the thinnest of margins. We balanced the budget and were on course to paying off the national debt, created a record number of jobs. The Dow Jones Industrial Average almost quadrupled. Fifty Democrats lost their seats when they voted for that bill. When you vote for deficit reduction, a lot of people will be casting career-ending votes. Increasing the threshold to three-fifths will just make it harder or even more impossible to pass.

What you can get three-fifths for, once you need three-fifths, any kind of budget can pass. You can have more tax cuts, and we got three-fifths votes from the $800 billion tax cut back in December. But a three-fifths vote, you can pass new tax cuts and new spending. You can make the deficit worse under the balanced budget amendment and probably will.

Also consider that it had the provision of two-thirds vote to increase taxes. That will obviously make it more difficult to balance the budget. Two-thirds vote to spend more than 18 percent of GDP, a number we haven't seen since Medicare was enacted. That means you're going to have pressure on Medicare and Social Security.

Interestingly, if you put all of these things together, you'll notice that you can cut Medicare benefits or Social Security benefits with a simple majority. But to save those programs with new taxes, a two-thirds vote in the House and a two-thirds vote in the Senate. And then to add insult to injury, it requires a three-fifths vote to increase the debt ceiling.

As if the drama that we've been through in the last few days and last few weeks isn't enough of a spectacle, they wanted to make that kind of thing routine, where we'd have to go through this every year. We've had to increase the debt ceiling on average once a year for the last 50 years. They want to go through this spectacle with a supermajority so that we can have these kinds of problems all along.

Now, we heard during consideration of the balanced budget amendment when we were in committee about Arizona's balanced budget amendment and how well it works. And we kept hearing this over and over again. So I thought, I wonder how they do that? So I Googled it.

Mr. GARAMENDI. Excuse me. You said that Arizona has a balanced budget amendment in their Constitution and somehow they balance their budget.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. And I couldn't figure out how they have done it over the past few years. I figured there must be something in there. So
we Googled it, thanks to Google. And we found out. The first thing I found out is, with 6.3 million people, they got $6.4 billion of stimulus money that the Federal Government borrowed and then sent to them. A thousand dollars for every man, woman, and child--$4,000 for every family. That helped them balance the budget.

But that wasn't enough. You know what else they did? They sold their State capitol and supreme court building. Did you hear what I said? They sold the State capitol building for $735 million and sold the supreme court building for $300 million and leased it back. That extra billion dollars in the budget was necessary for them to balance their budget.

Mr. GARAMENDI. Excuse me for a second, if I might interrupt. One of the proposals coming from some of the Republicans was to sell America's assets. Do you suppose they intended to sell the U.S. Capitol?

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Well, the Arizona State capitol was sold and leased back. So there's no telling what they might want to do. But the really regrettable part of this is the process that we're in. Because we just passed a bill that provides for trillions of dollars in unspecified cuts. They slapped the thing together behind closed doors. The final version was developed this morning after the bill had been debated. There was only 1 minute left in the debate, and they changed the bill. They added in the balanced budget amendment and some other kinds of changes and sprung it on the House.

We finished the debate this afternoon. Vote it up or down, no amendments. We took all that time doing it on a bill that 53 Senators have signed a letter saying that they're going to oppose it as soon as it gets over there.

Now, I said unspecified amendments because they don't cut anything in their bill. There are no cuts. There are caps. So we don't know what the cuts will be because they're just spending caps. We will find out next month what they have in mind because that's when we'll try to appropriate under the caps, and then we'll figure out what actually has to be cut.

But we'd have an idea of what they might cut because earlier this year they had a bill of about $66 billion. Annualized, that would be about a hundred billion for the full year. In 10-year costs, that would be about a trillion. So if you want to know what a trillion-dollar 10-year cut would look like, we can see it.

Look at what they cut. They cut safety net programs like community action agencies, legal aid, energy assistance for low-income seniors, community health centers, WIC nutrition. All cut. They had investments in our future, education. All kinds of education programs, including Head Start and Pell Grants. Cut. Job training programs in the middle of an economic downturn. Cut. NASA and other scientific research, energy research. Cut. High-speed rail, investments in our future. Immunizations and AmeriCorp. Cut.

Then routine functions of government that you would hope would not have to get cut, like air traffic controllers. They're working so hard, they're falling asleep on the jobs. Cops and firefighters. Cut. FBI agents. We spent the last couple of days in the Judiciary Committee talking about trying to chase down cases involving child pornography, and we don't have enough FBI agents to chase them down. And what do they do? Cut FBI agents.

Clean Water grants, poison control, aid to small shipyards. We have a lot of shipyards in my district. National parks. OSHA--Occupational Safety and Health Administration--personnel cut. FEMA. With all the problems we've got all over the country now, floods and everything, FEMA is cut. They talk about border security. Border protection and border security. Cut. Food inspection.

That's just a small sample of what they had in that. Then in the next bill they're cutting Medicare. All of those cut. And that's just the first trillion.

I yield to the gentleman from Colorado.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. It's in that context that the actions of this Congress have to be taken into consideration because last December we passed
an $800 billion, 2-year tax cut--not new tax cuts--extending the ones that were there.

Had we let them expire, which I think would have been better judgment, we would not be in the situation we're in. We passed $400 billion a year tax cuts. We now have a general consensus that we need, in the next 10 years, $4 trillion worth of savings, deficit reduction, about $400 billion a year, exactly the same as what we did in tax cuts last year. All of these cuts we're talking about are necessary to partially offset the fact that we extended the tax cuts last year. And the process was all up or down. You had to vote it all up or down, one vote, without any choices. We didn't need to extend all of the tax cuts. Maybe if we extended some but not all, we could have avoided cuts in Head Start, in food inspectors, firefighters and those kinds of things. We didn't make the choice step by step. It was, we have to extend the tax cuts, and in order to preserve those tax cuts, we're making the cuts in Medicare and Social Security and Pell Grants and Head Start, clean water grants, poison control, and on and on. It's in that context that these cuts are so regrettable.

Mr. GARAMENDI. If I might, my good colleague from Virginia, on the floor today it was perfectly clear that the Republicans are refusing to even consider any increases in taxes or the elimination of tax breaks, on oil, on corporations that send jobs overseas, it's no. On the high end, the hedge fund managers that have a billion dollars of income, no, they're going to keep those tax breaks.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. On that point, if we do nothing and let them expire--we're not talking about new tax cuts--if we just let them expire, we have enough deficit reduction on the table to match Simpson-Bowles.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Thank you very much, and I appreciate your doing this.

As our friend from New York has said, we need to be focused on jobs. The other side of the aisle is quick to say that you cannot raise taxes in the middle of an economic downturn, and then the next thing they say is we need to cut spending. Spending cuts have a much larger impact on employment because, when you have an agency and when you cut the budget, people get fired immediately. There is a more immediate effect than tax cuts, which you don't pay until later on. It has a larger effect. So, when we start talking about the jobs, these cuts will have an adverse effect on jobs. We need to focus on jobs first.

We wouldn't be going through this kind of attack on our economy, on Medicare, on the education programs if it had not been for the threat to shut down the economy. This threat is unprecedented. We need to pay our obligations. We cannot default. It's actually manufactured, because never in American history has there been any serious effort to fail to pay our obligations as we've been going through in just these past few days.

We need to increase the debt ceiling in the same way we've done it every year, sometimes twice a year--on average about once a year, sometimes twice a year--over the last 50 years. Just increase the debt ceiling. We should not be jeopardizing. We should not be having all this uncertainty in the markets with what's going on here today. As that saying goes, "Just do it.''

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source