Date: 2006-03-07
Speaker: WASSERMAN SCHULTZ (democrat)
Chamber: H

I believe President Bush was in office then. In May of 2003. the debt limit was increased by another $984 billion. with a B. In November of 2004. the year of the election. $800 billion. We have a $781 billion increase pending now. with a total increase of $3.015 trillion. When President Clinton was in office. I was in the State legislature then. for a time until you were elected to Congress you were too. we had a system in place called PAYGO. payasyougo. which it is my understanding is similar to the way people prefer in America to run their households.- where you do not spend money that you dont have. unlike what is going on under the Republican leadership where they appear to enjoy spending like drunken sailors and "no" doesnt appear to be possible under this administration. unless. of course. it is to talk about continuing tax cuts for the wealthiest. We say. "yes" to that. We say "yes" to anything politically that they want to advance. The "no" is to people who cant afford health care. cutting Medicaid. The "no" that they propose to say is to people who are struggling to pay for higher education. So. if we went back to PAYGO rules. which we have proposed time and again and they have rejected. time and again. then we would be again in a situation where it wouldnt be necessary to increase the debt limit because we would be only spending money that we have. Here is another third party validator. 2006. in this budget resolution. of course it was defeated. 228 Republicans voted against it. it was defeated 264165 when we proposed to return to the payasyougo rules. Then again last year. it was defeated 232194 and 224 Republicans voted against it. So. to me to break this down in more simple terms. because PAYGO and billions and trillions and debt limit is something that if you are not dealing with it on a daily basis.it is somewhat difficult to understand. one of the things we like to do here is break things down for people that may be listening into regular terms. into the things that they deal with every day. .So.I thought. Mr. Speaker. it would be a good idea. because a billion is a very big number. a billion is a hard concept to grasp. because mostpeople dont deal in the billions when they are dealing with their everyday normal activity. so lets try todefine what a billion is in the way that people think about things in their daily life. Broken down. a billion hours ago. for example. humans were making their first tools. in the stone age. That is how much a billion hours ago was. if you are thinking about what a billion means. Lets think about what happened a billion seconds ago. A billion seconds ago it was 1975 and the last American troops had just pulled out of Vietnam. That is how big a billion is. We are in 2006. That was 30 years. 31 years ago. A billion minutes ago it was 104 A.D.. Mr. Speaker. and the Chinese first invented paper. That is how long ago it was. if you think about a billion in terms of minutes. Then a billion dollars ago. under this administration and under the Republican leadership. a billion dollars ago was only 3 hours and 32 minutes at the rate that the administration and this Republican Congress spends money. So we have a billion hours ago. it was the stone age. a billion seconds ago. it was 31 years ago. a billion minutes ago. it was 104 A.D. and we were first talking about the invention of paper. But under the Republican leadership and this administration. a billion. dollars ago was only 3 hours 3Z minutes at the rate of spending under this administration and the Congressional leadership. It is just astonishing. it really is. if you think about it. broken down in this way. All the American people want is their confidence restored. All they want to see is that the people here in this Chamber are using their heads and applying some common sense and thinking about the budget and the money that we spend in the way they would like to think about their own household budget. spending the money that we have. spending it wisely. spending it on things that they care about. not giving away the store. which unfortunately.- it appears to be the direction that we have been going in. We are giving away the store in so many ways. Like the port deal. for example. We represent Miami. both of us. I represent Fort Lauderdale. I have both Port Everglades and the port of Miami abutting my district. I went down to the port of Miami. you and I have both been there. it is one of the six ports that the Dubai Ports World deal impacts. and for the people that I have talked to in our community and the calls and communications I have been getting. -it defies logic. They really just cannot believe that the President does not understand why people are so deeply concerned that we would have a foreign governmentowned c6rporation running the terminal oberations at six of our major ports. This is not just any government. this is a government that just 5 years ago was involved directly. indirectly. in both tangential and more substantive ways in the 9/11 attacks. fl 2310 There were 58 references in the 9/11 Commission Report to the United Arab Emirates and their involvement. either through allowing the 9/11 financing to be funneled .through their banks. or just the fact that two of the 9/11 terrorists lived in the United Arab Emirates. But the astonishing thing is that there were no national security reviews triggered under the law when the administrations committee that reviewed these deals took a look at it. There were no alarm bells set off. And that is even more astonishing because it is not even like we are checking the Vast majority of containers.and goods that come through our ports. Less than 6 percent. if you. take a look at this chart. less than 6 percent of U.S. cargo coming through our ports is physically inspected. Mr. Speaker. Ninetyfive percent is not inspected. 5 percent is inspected. And that is in spite of the fact that Democrats have repeatedly proposed increasing the funding so .that we can ensure more of the cargo coming through our ports is inspected. Literally what I learned when I went to the Port of Miami. Mr. MEEK. is that in the last 5 years we have increased our security funding at our airports by $18 billion which is a good thing. I mean that is absolutely essential. And we have increased our port security funding by $700 million. Now. if you remember. I just went over the difference of what a billion means. So $18 billion on airport security. les than $700 million on port security. I mean. you cannot rest our Nations security bn taking your shoes off as you go through the magnetometer at an airport. That cannot be the sum total of the additional security that we have increased since 9/11. I yield to the gentleman from Ohio .