Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Chairman, in August of 2010, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs warned that the greatest threat to our national security was our national debt. That was $4 trillion of debt ago. In fact, since the inauguration in 2009, we have accumulated more total government debt than we have run up from the very first day of the Washington administration through the third year of the George W. Bush administration.

We were told this would jump-start the economy. It hasn't. Instead, it has deprived markets of the capital that would otherwise be loaned to businesses seeking to expand jobs, to consumers seeking to make purchases, and to home buyers seeking to reenter the housing market.

I would remind the House that we cannot provide for the common defense or promote the general welfare if we cannot pay for them, and the ability of our government to do so is being slowly and surely destroyed by our debt. Balancing this budget and ultimately paying down the national debt is a national security imperative, it is an economic imperative, and it is a moral imperative.

Under Chairman Ryan's leadership, the House is about to pass the fourth budget in a row to balance. It stands in stark contrast to the President's budget that never balances and that condemns our Nation to a debt spiral that will consume our future. It reforms and reorganizes our social safety nets. It prevents their impending bankruptcy, and it restores them to financial sound foundations for the generations to come.

This is not beyond our ability. President Clinton, working in cooperation with a Republican Congress, delivered four balanced budgets in a row. Together, a Democratic President and a Republican Congress cut Federal spending by 4 percent of GDP. They enacted what amounted to the biggest capital gains tax cut in American history. They reformed entitlement spending by abolishing the open-ended welfare system. The economy blossomed.

In the years since, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, we have veered far from these policies of fiscal responsibility and economic expansion, and the economy languishes.

The budget before us combines the policies necessary not only to restore solvency to the government and save the social safety net, but it also restores prosperity to the American people. All we lack is the same cooperation from the President and the Senate that we had just two decades ago.

Time is not our ally. Every day we delay, the problem becomes more intractable and the road back becomes more difficult, protracted, and perilous.

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