Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak tonight. I consider myself an honorary member of the 30-something Group now that I have passed 40. I am here strictly as a visitor. But I was taken by some of the discussion that was going on here on the floor, and I want to make one philosophical point and one economic point to essentially affirm some of the things that the gentlemen were saying.
First of all, there is a great deal of discussion inherent in the President's debates that seeks to drive a wedge between two generations. The beauty of the Social Security program is it was a classic generational compact. One generation supports the other. And the President when he embarked on his campaign across the country kept saying, well, seniors, you do not need to worry about this. We are not touching your benefits. This is entirely about the next generations.
This is the first time in my memory, and we, the three of us, have not been around as long as some other Members of this august body, that you did not hear the President seeking to unify the country around an agenda. You heard him trying to divide the country to perpetuate an agenda, and I think that most Americans realize, whether they be younger or older, that at the end of the day the Social Security program has worked exactly as it was intended since the moment it was passed.
Sometimes you build up large surpluses and you spend them down as the next generation retires. Sometimes you have gifts, sometimes you have ebbs and flows, and there has been inherent in this debate a certain sense of it is about me now, rather than the idea that we are going to be there for the next generation the same way they were there for us.
If I could just make an economic point based on the charts that you have been showing, some people say and even some economists say, well, deficits really do not matter. There are a lot of people in this matter who are in the deficits-do-not-matter school. Well, that may have been true in the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s because, frankly, there was no place else on Earth for someone to invest their money except in U.S. dollars. If you ran up a big deficit, it did not matter. It is not going to stop someone from coming in here and saying, well, if you are the Chinese, as my colleague so aptly put, if we are the Saudis or Egyptians, if we want to put our money someplace safe, we have to buy Treasury bills and invest in the economy, we have no other choice. What choice do we have? There is no other economy in the world that can sustain it.
Well, for the first time the Euro has now become a reserve currency of the world that is competing with us. So what does this mean to the average New Yorker, the average person who lives in Ohio or Florida?
What it means is that we, the Federal Government, are going to have to compete with Europe in terms of who is going to have the higher interest rate. What does that mean? That means that not only are T-bills going to be higher, your interest rates on our credit cards is going to be higher. Your interest on your bank loans is going to be higher. Your interest rate on your mortgage is going to be higher. If you think this only matters to you, you are 30 years from retiring or getting a Social Security check today, you are completely wrong.
If we keep going on this path, what we are going to be doing is essentially competing with ourselves for interest, and it is going to wind up costing average Americans hundreds and hundred of dollars each month on their dollars. If we have one good thing going for us in the last couple of years, it is low interest rates. If it were not for low interest rates driving demand for homes and cars, this economy would be in a worse rut than it has been in the last several years, and we are putting that at risk, and that is why deficits matter.
Deficits matter for another reason. Those of us in this House, and I think the three of us are in this crowd, who are true conservatives when it comes to money, we look at the idea of being a conservative person is to say, look, I derive certain debts, I rack up certain debts, whether I borrow money or I spend freely, it is my obligation to be responsible for those things. Anyone who sits in this Chamber, who campaigns as a fiscal conservative, who supports the continuation of that chart that is to your right is simply not a conservative. You cannot legitimately make that claim.
I believe that in the years that you refer to when Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan got together and did things, frankly sometimes did a half-a-loaf thing that neither side was completely happy about, the one thing they did have was this intellectual consistency about saying if we are going to spend it, we are going to pay for it; if we are going to augment the Department of Defense, we are going to do the best we can to pay for it.
We even reached a moment in this House when our deficits were at the paltry amount of $250- or $260 billion, where we said we are going to pass laws to restrict ourselves. The Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act said you cannot spend a single dime unless you pay as you go. A lot of people said it was really bad because it hurt some programs more than others, but at least it was an acknowledgment in this House, an acknowledgment that the government has, at the end of the day, to be responsible for the deficit.
Today, the philosophy is entirely different. Today, it is not our problem, which brings us back to the original problem, that we have now started to say it is all about us, it is all about this moment in time, not thinking at all about the next generation, not thinking at all about the past generation. That is why deficits matter. That is why the President's plan matters to wherever you are on the demographic scale, this is an issue that matters to all Americans.
I want to thank the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan) because he has been out here many times talking about this. People have been sending e-mails and saying we get it. That is where fundamentally the President has to understand. This is not a matter of going out and doing a campaign swing like you mentioned. This is a matter that fundamentally people understand it is our obligation, both in the Social Security system and fundamentally to our children, that we do not continue exacerbating that problem.
