Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCALISE. I want to thank my colleague from Georgia for yielding and for his leadership in bringing forth this budget. As the chairman of the Republican Study Committee's Budget and Spending Task Force, Mr. Woodall has brought this budget called Back to Basics, and that is really what we are here to talk about right now.

Madam Chair, what are those basics we should get back to?

I think they are the basic fundamentals that our Founding Fathers laid out when they created this great Nation. It is still the greatest nation in the history of the world, but it is a nation with serious challenges.

If you look at our economy, our economy is struggling in many ways because of policies coming out of Washington, because of Washington's failure to confront those challenges.

People across this country are ready to confront those challenges. They are looking to us to finally start laying out a vision that says we are going to start living within our means, that we are going to do the things that families across this Nation do every single year, and that is finally getting back to fiscal discipline.

When my friend on the other side--I guess the person who is tasked with coming and opposing budgets that balance--uses terms like ``draconian''--Madam Chair, I will tell you what is draconian. What is draconian is to deny the opportunity to our children and grandchildren that we enjoy today, something that every single generation in the history of our country has.

One of the pure definitions of the American Dream is that every generation in our Nation's history, since George Washington led us through that Revolution, has had better opportunities than those that we enjoy today; yet most people in this country recognize, if we don't get our fiscal house in order, our children--my 7- and 4-year-olds, whom my wife drove to school this morning--won't have those same opportunities, and they all deserve the opportunities that we enjoy.

So how do we do it? How do we get back to basics?

We do it by having really good, strong, bold policy--bold policy that says we ought to live within our means.

Our budget balances by year 4. In 2018, we have a balanced Federal budget. If you compare that with President Obama's budget, he has got a budget that has over $1 trillion in new taxes.

Our colleagues on the other side of the aisle say: oh, you need to stick more taxes on all of these businesses.

If anybody is making a profit in America, it seems like they want to put a bull's-eye on him. If one happens to be successful and make a profit and create jobs in this country, that is somehow a bad thing.

If you take their approach in their budgets--in all of their budgets--they have over $1 trillion in new taxes. President Obama has nearly $2 trillion in new taxes, so you would think: okay, all of those new taxes must be what get you to balance.

In fact, Madam Chair, all of those new taxes just get you more despair. This President's budget never, ever gets to balance, but he has all of those tax increases that our colleagues on the other side of the aisle talk about.

In our budget, we don't have any new tax increases. What we have is good, smart fiscal discipline policy that says let's get our economy moving again and let's believe in the American people.

By not raising taxes and by getting our economy moving, you actually get to balance in 4 short years and start creating surpluses, so we can pay back that debt, as my friend from Georgia talked about, so that we don't have to send all of those interest payments to other countries and to other priorities. Let's set those priorities in America.

How do we do this? How do we actually get back to balance in such a short period of time?

Number one, we save Medicare from bankruptcy, just as Paul Ryan does in the House Republican budget that came out of the Budget Committee. We share many of those same principles that get us to fiscal responsibility by saving Medicare, by not letting it go bankrupt, as our colleagues on the other side do and as the President's own budget does.

The President's own budget allows Medicare to go bankrupt. We don't think that is responsible, so we take care of those who paid into a system over their lifetimes.

We also invoke smart policy. If you start with health care, in our bill, we actually repeal the President's health care law and replace it with the American Health Care Reform Act, a bill that actually puts patients back in charge of their health care and that allows us to, again, have families be in charge of those decisions and to lower costs.

It is good, smart policy. We will talk more about it, but this is the right path to getting our economy back on track.

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