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(Washington D.C.)- I rise in support of the pay-as-you-go legislation before the House.
Across the length and breadth of this country, Americans are making some tough choices when it comes to their families’ spending. They are tightening their belts and deferring major purchases. When they do buy something, consumers are increasingly choosing to pay for it with cash.
A similar choice is before the House today. Over the last eight years, Congress has dug itself a deep budget hole. The choice before us is whether to take a necessary step to stem the tide of red ink, or continue to pay lip service to the problem and dig the hole deeper.
It is disingenuous to suggest that the deficit problem began recently with the financial crisis and the recession. At the end of the 1990s, the federal government was balanced. We were actually running large budget surpluses and paying down the national debt. The pay-as-you-go rules that were in effect throughout the 1990s deserve a lot of credit. These rules simply said that Congress could only spend money for tax cuts and entitlement spending programs if they were fully paid for with savings elsewhere in the budget.
In 2002, the pay-as-you-go rules expired and the Republican-led Congress and the Bush Administration refused to extend them. Instead, the Administration and Congress went on a massive spending and tax cut spree. We all know the result. The public debt nearly doubled under the previous Administration, rising from $3.4 trillion in 2001 to $6.3 trillion on January 20, 2009.
We need to get back to commonsense budgeting. We know these rules work. Others will try and change the subject and say that runaway tax cuts are not the problem. The House needs to reject this argument and restore budget discipline where it is needed most.
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