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“THE FEDERAL DEFICIT” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Commerce was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H2645 on March 3, 1995.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
THE FEDERAL DEFICIT
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Oxley). Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from New York [Mr. Solomon] is recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. SOLOMON. Mr. Speaker, I was going to stand up here today and talk about the fact that over the last 16 years I have been trying to enact legislation dealing with regulatory reform that would give back property rights to the people of this country, but I was so angered this morning when I woke up about 6 a.m. in the morning and I was watching CNN. I saw the President and his press secretary talking about how they had killed the balanced budget amendment. And how they now could get down to the serious business of balancing the budget over the next 7 years.
I have never been so mad in my life. I have a chart here, which says,
``deficit projections and debt accumulation.'' This was President Clinton's budget as he offered it last year. And as you can see, he projected a deficit in 1995 of $165 billion, and it grew all the way over so that at the end of 5 years, there is an accumulation of $894 billion in new accumulated debt to go to the $4.5 trillion we already have.
This year, in January, he just gave us his new 5-year projection. This is just a year later. And what does this show? It shows in 1995,
$193 billion in accumulated debt in just this first year. That is 30 billion higher than last year. And if you look at 1996, it goes from
$170 billion deficit to $197 billion and so on over to the end of the 5-year period.
So what has he done? He has increased the national debt by almost a trillion dollars over the next 5 years. And they talk about wanting to balance the budget.
The one thing that is said is true, and that is that Congress just does not have the guts to balance the budget themselves. That is too bad. And, therefore, they do need that prodding. That is what those five Senators that promised to vote for a balanced budget amendment last year during their election said that needed to happen. Yet today they turned around and voted ``no.''
You know, Mr. Speaker, I introduced a budget last year. It was an alternative to both the Democrat and Republican budgets. And if you look at this bottom figure, we accumulated, instead of a trillion dollars over 5 years, we accumulated only $252 billion. But the interesting thing is that every single year the deficit dramatically dropped from $132 billion the first year down to $69 billion the second year, $47 billion the third year, $12 billion the fourth year, and a surplus of $8 billion in the fifth year.
You say, how did you do that? Because all of the pundits say, you cannot do that without raising taxes. You cannot do that without cutting Social Security. You cannot do that without cutting into contractual obligations to veterans.
Well, my colleagues, we did that. How did we do it. We did it by eliminating 150 programs like the Interstate Commerce Commission, that is totally wasteful. We privatized 125 government agencies, like the Federal Aviation Administration. We consolidated 35 government functions like the Bureau of Indian Affairs that has been there for 70 years and does nothing today. And downsized the Department of Education from 5,000 employees down to an office of only 500. We abolished the Department of Energy, which has not produced a gallon of gasoline or a quart of oil, we cut out 16,000 employees there and let the free market system work.
We converted the Department of Commerce from an overblown department of 36,000 employees down to only 3,000 and made them a consultative body to business and industry instead of this huge bureaucratic department. And then we means tested every single Federal program, including school lunch programs.
People say, Republicans want to do away with school lunch programs. We do not want to do away with school lunch programs. What we want to do is make Members of Congress ineligible because of their total wages. We make $129,000 or $130,000 a year. Why should the Government be subsidizing my children's school lunches? They should not, because we cannot afford it. And we means test that with people with incomes over
$50,000.
Medicare, people with incomes of over $100,000 or $200,000 are being subsidized by the Federal Government for their health care. That is all well and good, I suppose, if you can afford it. But we do not have the money. And we means test everything else across the board.
Do you know what that did? That gave us an $800 billion savings over 5 years, and we balanced the budget without hurting people, by truly taking care of the needy.
It can be done, but we cannot do it the way this president is trying to do it.
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