Issues Facing America

Floor Speech

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Mrs. CAPITO. Thank you.

I would like to thank my colleagues here today for the opportunity to talk about something that is extremely important to every woman in America, every person in America. It is not really a man or woman thing, or a child or a grandparent thing. It is all of us. So I look at things a lot of times, like a lot of people, I try to put my own life filter over what is going on here.

I'm in the sandwich generation. I have elderly parents who are having bumpy roads with their health. I just today for the very first time had my only and most beautiful granddaughter with me today on the House floor. I realized poor little Celia has $45,000 worth of national debt on her head. And then I think of my parents trying to manage their health care and their finances in their senior years: have they prepared enough, and did they make the right choices. I think about all of the in-between generation, the sandwich generation which I am, and I know that we want to make the right choices for ourselves so when our children are taking care of us, those decisions can be easier for them and we can be well prepared.

Quite honestly, with a $14 trillion debt, I don't think we're going to be prepared. What kind of handcuffs are we putting on our future generation?

I think about times in my life when maybe I have gone up to the limit on my credit card or maybe things haven't been as--particularly when we were younger, trying to buy a house for the first time and trying to figure out how we were going to manage the dollars when we were first getting started, and when we realized maybe we were going a little over the limit or spending too much, was the first thing we thought about, was it let's get a loan, let's ask our parents for more money?

No, the first thing you think about is how are we going to cut back? How are we going to save? How are we going to live within our means? Because that is the reasonable and rational way. That is the way that our parents did it, and that's the way we've tried to do it.

But that's not the way things go on here in Washington. A lot of people say why is it only about cutting spending. Because if we don't prove and show we can cut spending at the beginning before we talk about anything else, we are never going to do it. I think those are the hard decisions. Those are the kitchen-table decisions. All great change in America begins at the dinner table. That is a Ronald Reagan quote. That is absolutely true. That is why I think the Cut, Cap, and Balance bill that we passed yesterday makes so much sense to a lot of American women around the kitchen table because that's what they're doing.

And so I think when we think about it in terms of the balanced budget, when I listened to the debate yesterday, I think about my home State of West Virginia. We have a balanced budget. We have hundreds of millions of dollars in surplus right now because we are not permitted by law to spend more than we bring in. And so we had a good year this year for a lot of different reasons. But I think some of it is the smart budgeting that we did up front as a State--make tough decisions as a State to make sure that at the end of the year we're not dipping into the rainy day fund, that we're not finding ourselves saying the only way we can save ourselves is to raise somebody's taxes. It's because the spending decisions that were made in the front end with a budget--we have a budget for the first time in, I think, 3 years in the House.

And everybody around their kitchen table makes a budget. If they don't make it every year, certainly when they're in trouble they start making a budget. You do really simple things like decide not to go out to eat, stop your magazine subscriptions. The easy things first and then the really hard decisions. That's where we are right now are the hard decisions.

I think as a daughter and as a mother of a daughter and a mother of now a granddaughter, I think women make a lot of these decisions. I see the generations changing. I see the decisions maybe that my mom made were not as involved as the ones that I'm making. And I certainly can see that my own daughter, independent, on her own, is going to be so much more empowered financially to make decisions. So let's not leave her and the next generations holding a big IOU on their back. Let's take the opportunity.

Another question I get is that we've raised the debt ceiling how many times in the past--numerous times in the past. I think they were quoting 17 times under Ronald Reagan or something like that, if I recall correctly. And that is correct. We have raised the debt ceiling. I've voted to raise it before. But this is different. We need to seize this opportunity. Because if we don't seize the opportunity to clamp down on the spending now when the American people realize what an issue and what a problem and what a generational burden we're passing on--we have the ear of the American people, and that's the difference. That's the difference.

A lot of things in our lives are all about timing. Certainly political lives are all about timing. Sometimes you can have the greatest candidate in the world, and if it's not the right time, they can't make it. And this is the time. This is the time for us to grab the reins, to say to the Senate and the President and the American people, We're ready, you're ready, and let's join together and do this.

So I look forward to hopefully Cut, Cap, and Balance making it through the Senate. But at least if it doesn't make it in the form we pass today, the concepts within this--cutting, capping, and balancing our budgets--are everyday events in people's lives. We need to do it here. I look forward to joining with all my fellow women Republicans we're talking with today, with the rest of the women in the country, but also every man, woman, and child in this country, because it's all about every American, and we don't want to see an overburden on either the older generation, the younger generation, or the generations to come.

Thank you for having us. I look forward to working together

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