Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCLINTOCK. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Chairman, we need to discuss the budget under the ominously growing shadow of unprecedented debt that has literally doubled in the last 8 years.

With crushing debt comes ruinous interest costs that the CBO warns will exceed our entire military budget within the decade on our current trajectory.

The budget produced by Chairman Price's House Budget Committee meets our current defense demands by adding additional money into the war account. But I would reassure the ranking member that it funds that increase through a concomitant decrease in other spending. That will hold us on a trajectory to balance the budget in less than 10 years and then begin paying down the unprecedented debt that this administration has run up.

Unfortunately, this plan is met with opposition from so-called defense hawks who want the extra spending for defense, which this budget provides, but who don't want to go through the fuss and bother of paying for it. And therein lies the problem.

This is not just a 1-year increase. Because it increases defense spending without making other cuts, it changes the overall spending trajectory over the next 10 years.

And here is the simple math of the matter. This adds more than $20 billion to our total spending this year, and it, in effect, repudiates the budget plan for additional reductions next year. On this new trajectory that these budget hawks would set, there will be no balanced budget in 10 years, even if we enacted every other reform called for in the budget and maintained all other departments within these constraints.

After 10 years, we will still be running deficits of nearly $100 billion a year, and interest costs will have eaten us alive. That is why it is so important to pass the budget intact, without the amendments being proposed.

I am curious how the self-proclaimed defense hawks claim to defend our country when our credit is shot and our debt service is approaching $1 trillion a year. They forget that in the spring of 1945, carrying a debt proportional to the one we have today, there was serious doubt over whether we could continue to conduct the war for another year.

When he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullin warned that in his professional military judgment, the greatest threat to our national security is the national debt. He made that warning 5 years and $4 1/2 trillion of debt ago.

History warns us that countries that bankrupt themselves aren't around very long because before you can provide for the common defense, you have to be able to pay for it, and the ability of our Nation to do so is coming into grave doubt. The Budget Committee's budget offers us a very narrow path out of debt while continuing to fund our military at the requested levels, and its adoption, intact, is indispensable both to our short-term and to our long-term defense needs.

Mr. Chairman, we have a stark choice before us: pay for the needed increases in defense by reducing other spending, or refuse to pay for those increases and sacrifice the long-term security and prosperity of our country on the altar of instant gratification.

Amongst the most chilling words in history are those attributed to Louis XV, ``After us, the flood.'' Let that not be the epitaph of this Congress.

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