Increasing the Debt Limit

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. I thank the gentleman from South Carolina for yielding, and I thank him for his leadership.

We have heard that we have had to increase the debt limit. This chart shows why the debt ceiling had to be increased. It shows the deficit from the Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations, the Reagan and Bush administrations, the deficit changing into a surplus, and then the massive red ink in this administration. It shows that it may get a little better for a couple of years, but unless there is a profound change in direction, it just keeps getting worse.

When you run up this kind of deficit, we talk about increasing the debt limit, but one thing you have to do is pay interest on all of that debt. We have heard that the surplus projected at the end of the Clinton administration would have virtually paid off the debt held by the public by 2008. Instead, by 2008 we will have almost a $300 billion additional interest on the debt that has been run up. $300 billion increased interest to be paid.

We talk about No Child Left Behind underfunded by $9 billion, veterans' health care underfunded by a couple of billion dollars. We have got other things, a couple of billion dollars here and there. We are squeezing here and there. By 2008, interest on the national debt, money just down the drain, $300 billion additional because of the fiscal irresponsibility.

We hear that they want to privatize Social Security. This is the Social Security cash flow which my colleagues will notice, in 2017, instead of a surplus, we are going to be starting to run a deficit, huge deficits approaching, by 2037, $1 trillion. One wonders how could we ever have paid this surplus and why we should be running up as much of a surplus as possible now to be able to accommodate this.

This chart shows that if you look at the tax cuts that this administration has enacted and has in store, the present value of all of those tax cuts is $14.2 trillion. We could have paid all of the Social Security benefits without increasing the age of retirement, without reducing benefits, for $3.7 trillion in present value.

Medicare's deficit, the same kind of chart, $8.2 trillion. $11.9 trillion is what it would have cost to make Social Security and Medicare both financially solvent for the next 75 years. $14.2 trillion in tax cuts. We had a choice: Tax cuts or make Social Security and Medicare solvent for 75 years. We made the wrong choice.

This chart responds to the adage, if you don't change directions, you might end up where you are headed. This chart shows where we are headed at our present rate and present policies. This shows that right now we are borrowing money to pay for some of the green which is Federal spending. Unfortunately, by 2040, unless there is a profound change in direction, we will be able to pay interest on the national debt and a little bit of Social Security and have to borrow the rest of the money for Social Security. We will have no money for Medicare and Medicaid and no money for government spending like defense, education, transportation.

Obviously, there has to be a profound change in direction. Otherwise, interest on the national debt will start eating up virtually every penny that we have.

We are going in the wrong direction. We have to change directions back to the period of time when we made the tough choices, eliminated the deficit and created the surplus. We can go back to that era if we make the tough choices, make the right choices, but we are not doing that now. When we start talking about increasing the debt ceiling, this is one of the symptoms and one of the consequences of all of this red ink.

I thank the gentleman from South Carolina for yielding, and I thank him for his leadership on fiscal responsibility.

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