Policies that Work

Floor Speech

Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, as we begin the annual budget process, we need to stop thinking in terms of Democratic and Republican policies and start thinking in terms of what policies have worked and what policies have not. The successes and failures of both parties could teach us much.

We are now in the sixth year of policies that promise to restore prosperity to America by radically increasing government spending and government intervention in our economy. These 6 years have not been happy ones for our Nation.

When people say this is the worst economy since the depression, I remember a time much more recently when we suffered double-digit unemployment, double-digit inflation, mile-long lines around gas stations, and the prime interest rate at 20.5 percent. Perhaps we don't remember these times as vividly because they didn't last very long.

That was the end of the Carter administration. We elected Ronald Reagan who declared that: ``Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.''

He reduced the tax and regulatory burdens that were crushing the economy and produced one of the most prosperous periods in our Nation's history. In doing so, he was following the precedent of successful presidencies from both parties, including Calvin Coolidge in the 1920s, Harry S. Truman in the mid-1940s, and John F. Kennedy in the early 1960s.

Lest we forget, in 1995, President Bill Clinton proclaimed: ``The era of big government is over.'' He dramatically reduced Federal spending as a percentage of GDP.

He signed what amounted to the biggest capital gains tax cut in American history. He reduced entitlement spending by reforming the open-ended welfare system. He produced 4 years of budget surpluses, and the economy blossomed.

George W. Bush pursued the opposite policies with the opposite results. He dramatically increased Federal spending as a percentage of GDP. He pushed through the biggest expansion of entitlement spending since the Great Society. He began the folly of stimulus spending. He turned in massive budget deficits, and the economy tanked.

The problem with Barack Obama is not that he changed Bush's policies, but, rather, that he did not change them. He took the worst of them and doubled down.

He has added $6.8 trillion to the national debt, meaning that today's young people will have to pay back $56,000, plus interest, per household through their future taxes for nothing more than to pay for this administration's overspending.

He seized one-sixth of the American economy that provides our health care and is well on the way to wrecking it for millions of American families, costing them their health plans, their doctors, their savings, and their security. He has increased annual taxes by $551 billion. That averages about $4,600 for every household in America.

He made a lot of promises that turned out not to be true. He promised that massive government spending would produce prosperity. Instead, average personal incomes declined $2,600 during his presidency, and food stamp dependency is at an all-time high.

Nearly one in six Americans is now living in poverty, including 22 percent of all children. The workforce has shrunk to a smaller proportion of the population, as it was during the disastrous Carter years.

He promised a government takeover of our health care would reduce our health costs and increase coverage for Americans. It has done exactly the opposite. Millions more American families have lost their health plans and their doctors than have gained them, and the overwhelming majority has suffered ruinous increases in their health care costs.

The result is a declining standard of living at home, a declining respect for America abroad, and a generation in danger of becoming the first in our history to be less well off than their parents.

Mr. Speaker, our own experience should now tell us that these policies don't work. They didn't work under George W. Bush, and they certainly haven't worked under Barack Obama. We know what does work, reducing the financial and regulatory burdens that government has placed on the economy, as both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton proved.

It is time that we abandon these policies of debt, doubt, and despair. It is time we recognize that this government has grown too big and too powerful at the expense of hardworking taxpayers. It is time we restored those uniquely American principles of individual liberty, constitutionally limited government, and personal responsibility that have always been the foundation of our Nation's freedom, its prosperity, and its happiness.

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