The National Debt

Floor Speech

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I stand to talk about a looming crisis in this county, a problem that has the potential to affect every American from every State, from every political party, of every political ideology. That issue relates to our national debt.

We have accumulated nearly $15 trillion in debt through the Federal Government, which is a lot of money split up amongst 300 million Americans. It works out to close to $50,000 a head. A lot of people don't make that much money in a year, and yet that is what every man, woman, and child owes on a per capita basis the moment they are born. If it is calculated out on the basis of debt per taxpayer, the number is much larger, anywhere between $120,000 and $150,000 per head, depending on how you calculate it.

We are now approaching the August 2 deadline given to us by Secretary Geithner that has been identified as the time by which we must increase our national debt yet again, a debt that has been raised time and time again, resulting in our accumulation of about $10 trillion of new debt in roughly the last decade. This is a problem, and it is a problem that is only going to become more severe the longer we kick this can down the road without doing anything to change the way Washington brings money in and the way Washington spends money.

I want to talk for a minute first about how Washington brings money in. There are those who have suggested in this town very recently that what we need right now is a tax increase in order to address the debt crisis. I could not disagree more, and I need to state with the greatest emphasis I am able to place on this issue that a tax increase is something I would oppose, something I would devote every ounce of energy in me to opposing. The reason is we have in Washington something that is not a revenue problem. What we have is a spending problem. Spending is the crisis that we need to address.

But on a more fundamental level we have to remember what we do when we raise taxes. When we raise taxes, we chill investment. It is investment that we rely on for the creation of jobs. We have to remember that government doesn't have the power to create jobs, because it can't create wealth. It can create policies. It can adopt laws and regulations designed to promote or deter certain kinds of behavior. It can raise revenue through taxation. But it can't create wealth. All it can do is set in place certain circumstances that might allow wealth to be created or, in other circumstances, might deter new wealth from being created.

To have true wealth creation leading to true job creation, you have to have a circumstance in which willing investors with capital are ready to invest, have the reasonable assurance and promise that if they invest their money and thereby place it at risk, any gains resulting from that risky behavior will be gains that inure to their benefit, not taken away by some third party and not taken away by the government. So when we raise taxes, in effect what we are doing is deterring investment, deterring investment at a time when we are hemorrhaging jobs, and we can ill afford to lose any more. Not one job should be lost as a result of something the government does. We need to find ways to get the government out of the way so job creation can occur. But it can't occur whenever we punish the investor, whenever we tell the investor: Invest at your own risk, because if you dare to make a profit, we are going to take away more of that money than we have previously been taking away in taxes.

For that reason, I continue to emphasize the fact that I will oppose any attempt to address this debt limit crisis by raising taxes, and I will continue to oppose any effort to raise taxes. Spending is the problem.

As to the question of how Washington spends money, if the definition of insanity is the practice of doing something again and again expecting to achieve different results than we have achieved every time in the past, then we would be insane if we approach this debt limit discussion with the same kinds of tired, malfunctioning, unproductive strategies that have been employed in the past, strategies that focus exclusively on immediate cuts or even long-term cuts. Let me explain what I mean.

As we approach the debt limit discussion, there will be those who will want to focus a lot of the attention on long-term spending cuts. In other words, they might say, If we are going to raise the debt limit by $1 trillion, then we need to find $1 trillion in cuts that can be made. If we are going to raise it by $2 trillion, then we need to find $2 trillion to cut.

But of course we can't cut $1 trillion out of our budget immediately. That is not possible. We can't do that in 1 year. That would have to be stretched over a period of many years. Most likely, in this scenario, as it has been discussed, it would be stretched over a period of a decade or more.

We do have the power to control what we do in this Congress, but we can't bind the Congress that will take power in January of 2013, January of 2015, or 2017. Every 2 years, we get a new Congress in place and that Congress has the power to make those decisions that will best fit what they decide is in order at that time. We can't bind them permanently. So any promise that we make right now to cut, let's say, $2 trillion relies on the promise that that will be honored by future Congresses. We can't bind them to do that.

There is one way, however, we can bind them. That is by amending for the 28th time that 224-year-old document that has fostered the development of the greatest civilization the world has ever known. When we amend the U.S. Constitution, that is the one credible way, the one binding way in which one group of Americans can bind a future group of Americans. That is why I have said that the only circumstance in which I think it is appropriate for us to raise the debt limit is a circumstance in which Congress has first passed a balanced budget amendment out of Congress by the requisite two-thirds margin in this body and in the House of Representatives, and submitted it to the States for ratification. In that scenario, and only in that scenario, can we proceed with any degree of confidence that the commitments we make now to the American people, to make not just immediate cuts but long-term changes to the way we spend money, it is only in that scenario that those promises can be and will be honored, because it is only in that scenario that we can bind a future Congress.

That is why I have pledged to vote against, and to oppose in any way I can, any debt limit increase that involves something short of prior passage of a balanced budget amendment, in addition to any caps, in addition to any immediate cuts that may be raised.

We have got to have cuts. We have got to have some kind of spending cap, where we cap spending as a percentage of gross domestic product every year, and we have got to have a constitutional amendment requiring that and requiring the revenues and outlays match each other from year to year. If we don't have this, then we are at great risk for the practice of perpetual deficit spending in which Congress year in and year out spends more than it takes in.

Congress can sustain this for a period of time. But where, as is now the case, the amount of money Congress spends is in excess of $1.5 trillion a year more than it brings in, we have reached a certain point of unsustainability at which, if we continue with this practice, a halt in borrowing will be much more immediate, much more Draconian than anything that could be within our control. At some point, those who would be willing to loan us that money, who would be willing to buy U.S. Treasury instruments of one form or another to finance our debt, will eventually start demanding a higher and higher yield. That means that instead of spending about $250 billion a year on interest on our national debt, as we are currently paying, the time could very soon come in which we might have to pay something closer to $700 billion just to pay the interest on our national debt. In fact, if we were now required to pay interest rates on our Treasury instruments consistent with the 40-year average, we would be about there.

Mr. President, $700 billion is a lot of money. Seven hundred billion dollars in a year is roughly what we spend on Social Security. It is roughly what we spend on Medicare and Medicaid combined in a year. It is roughly what we spend in national defense in an entire year. If we have to spend that amount of money every year, as we could easily have to spend within just few years' time if we continue spending at this rate, that is going to crowd out funding for every Federal program out there.

Whether you are most concerned, as many conservatives might be, about protecting national defense or whether you are most concerned, as many liberals are, about protecting our entitlement programs, you ought to insist, as I have been insisting, that we will not raise the debt limit until such time as the Congress has passed a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution. That is why I am pleased to support the ``cut, cap, and balance'' pledge and why I will continue to take this position in addition to standing firm on my position that we ought not even consider any tax increase at a time when we can least afford it.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of quorum.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source