Budget Control Act of 2011

Floor Speech

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Mr. POLIS. Mr. Speaker, this smoke-and-mirrors bill before us today actually stands to increase--yes, increase--the deficit of the United States of America by over $100 billion.

Let me walk the Speaker through the math here. This is why credit ratings matter: countries that have AA credit ratings--this is a group of them--pay an average interest on their sovereign debt of 3.75 percent. Countries with a AAA rating--this is a 10-year bond, but it would carry across 3-year, 5-year, 30-year in similar degrees--countries with AAA pay 2.98 percent. That's 1.75 percent, almost a 2 percent difference between AAA and AA.

In passing this bill today, which only has a 6-month extension, we are jeopardizing our AAA rating that will be incredibly hard to ever earn back. And in addition to paying 2 extra percentage points on your variable rate home mortgage that middle class families can't afford, 2 points more on your credit card debt, 2 points more on your car debt, in addition to that, Mr. Speaker, the government, the biggest borrower in the country, will pay more interest on the debt. Over 10 years that 1.75 percent difference, which is just taking the average between AAA and AA, costs over $100 billion a year in extra interest on the debt. Over a 10-year period, over $1 trillion of additional interest paid on the Federal debt.

So what are we doing? Cutting $915 billion and risking adding over $1 trillion in additional expenditures.

This smoke-and-mirrors effort before us today risks increasing the Federal deficit at a time when we all know we need to decrease Federal spending, we need to decrease our deficit. The last thing we need is to set motion forward to actually up our interest rate, jeopardize our credit rating because of the short-term nature, and increase the interest payments on our Federal debt.

I encourage my colleagues to look at these numbers and vote "no'' on the underlying bill.

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