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Floor Speech
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Mr. BRAUN. Madam President, here today, since I have been in the Senate, which has been a little over 5 years, I think I have been the most steadfast voice in terms of, whatever we want to do here, we shouldn't be borrowing it from our kids and our grandkids.
Any of you up there listening, it is a sad state of affairs in the sense that, just a little over 5 years ago, we were $18 trillion in debt, borrowing at the tune of about a trillion dollars a year to backfill for all the things we want to do here, and ask you and your kids to pay for it. To me, that is a bad business plan.
Sadly, it gets even worse. Over these 5 years, instead of a trillion dollars annually, it is now a trillion dollars every 6 months. For those of you who are good at math, take current interest rates and apply that to $34 trillion--soon to be $35 trillion, if it has not already crossed that threshold. That is a big figure with a lot of zeroes behind it. To put it in perspective, the interest on that alone is going to be about what we spend on defense in the next year or the discretionary side of our budget.
How we have ever gotten there, I don't know.
We are going to be considering another package tomorrow or Friday that takes the whole process of doing budgets, asking: Do you really need it? Aren't there some places that we could surely get back to where we don't spend more than we take in, because when we don't, we are borrowing every penny of it. And, on every dollar that we spend here, 5 years ago, it was about 20 cents of that dollar that we had to borrow. Now it is 30 cents. The arithmetic--the numbers--don't just go away.
It will be the single biggest thing all of you--this country--has to deal with over the next 5 to 10 years, and it is just starting to get to the point where it is going to, literally, break the back of the American public. Sooner or later, you won't have people lending us that money. Sooner or later, it is going to crowd out almost everything we do here, and it is shameful, in my mind.
I want to focus on one, actually, small part of it, but what is symbolic of what shouldn't be happening here: earmarks. Earmarks are justified because we ought to be able to maybe do it better here and should have input in it, and not let the executive branch do that. But to me, that would be valid if, in fact, we were balancing our budget in the first place.
Until we get total fiscal reform here and at least start to turn it around to where the deficits get smaller, the debt is never going to get smaller because, in general, if you take out a loan, imagine if you told your banker: I just want to pay interest only for as long as I have that loan.
They would laugh you out of the office.
So when it comes to earmarks, this bill is filled with them. It wasn't too many years ago that we got rid of them. Then the House started doing them again--both sides of the aisle. We are elective here, if you want to do it or not. But to me, that is fine, but not in the context that it is new money. For every earmark, you have to lend us the money or maybe somebody overseas. Who knows who will do it down the road?
It has a lot of other stuff in it that you are not going to like in terms of policy that goes along with the spending. It is no wonder to me that Americans say: What is going on here?
How are we going to change it? We are not going to change it until you demand it. Two simple things: term limits and a balanced budget amendment. Then it would run like your households and most other governments around our own country.
4366, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2024, that was printed in yesterday's Record.
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