Date: 2004-03-24
Speaker: GEORGE MILLER (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: California

Mr. Chairman. I thank the gentleman for yielding me time. Mr. Chairman. I wanted to take a moment to talk about this budget. What we really have seen here now. as the Republicans have taken over the House. is a complete and total loss of any sense of fiscal discipline. What they have done. and certainly since they have been joined with the Bush administration. its takeover of the White House. is they have simply done nothing more than add trillions of dollars to the debt of this country and run annual deficits of about $500 billion a year over and over and over again. Why is that so? Because they could not stand to have to engage in any kind of fiscal discipline. They want to blame it on President Clinton. They want to blame it on the economic cycles. They want to blame it on war. They want to blame it on terrorism. They want to blame it on the vernal equinox. But the fact of the matter is. the problem resides at home. It resides within the Republican philosophy of government. And that is simply to run deficits. It is what they did all during the 1980s when they were in control. Back 22 years ago I came to this Congress and I asked that the Congress adopt payasyougo rules. The Congress argued about it for a decade. The Republicans did not like it because they said they could not do tax cuts. And the Democrats did not like it because they could not spend on some of their programs. The conservatives were nervous and the liberals were nervous. But a decade later. George Bush. Sr.. signed payasyougo into law. and that became the means by which we engaged in fiscal discipline. After a decade of arguing. we adopted it and what happened? The deficit shrank. the economy soared. the budget. dare we speak. was balanced for the first time in 40 years. because people had to make choices and choose priorities. something you do not have to do any longer in Congress. You can just charge it to the deficit. You can just run crazy. You can just romp through the halls of government. run across the country and charge it all to the deficit. You want to engage in a war? You do not have to ask anybody to sacrifice. You can have a tax cut. You can do whatever you want. But when you do that. you end up where we are today. with trillions of dollars in Republicancreated debt. Trillions of dollars will be sent to the next generation. We all know the arguments. But why did that happen? I remember when I lost one of the votes on payasyougo by one vote. Senator Gramm. at that time a Democrat. would not vote for it. He said it was too weak. Just before he left the Senate. he asked for its repeal because it was too strong. He could not live within the fiscal discipline any longer. I guess he could not stand the surpluses that we were running. the money we were sending back to Social Security. the paying down of the deficit. Alan Greenspan talking about that we would not have 30year bonds anymore. The government had no debt to sell. We could not stand those halcyon days of fiscal responsibility. of balanced budgets and a roaring economy. So the Republicans jumped in the car. They got their good friend George Bush with them and they drove right over the cliff. Not a bad idea if it is just Republicans in the car. it is kind of like that joke about lawyers. But they took the Nation with them. They took the Nation with them into trillions of dollars of debt that was not here before. I do not think we need any lectures from the Republicans about fiscal responsibility. because when you took over the government. we handed you a surplus. We handed you a healthy economy. Gentlemen. you have run it into the ground. A little payasyougo. but you could not do it. You just could not bring yourselves to do it in this budget. The Senate did it. I am sure you can negotiate it away from them so you can keep spending your money and you can keep having your tax cuts and you can have your war on credit and you can hide the costs of veterans. I appreciate your tortured discussion of veterans. If it is so good. how come the Disabled American Veterans are asking people to vote against it? Maybe on the Beltway it sounds good. It is bigger. It ismore. It is larger. But it just will not supply enough health care to the veterans who need it. That is what the disabled vets say.