Allen Boyd

Mr. BOYD

Mr. BOYD. Mr. Chairman, I yield my time back to the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Everett).

Mr. BOYD

Mr. BOYD. Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, this provision in this bill, if it goes into law, will have the effect obviously of lifting the prohibition on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, which is of interest to many of those of us from Florida. And if that provision were to be lifted, I think there is a very significant impact on the military training mission that exists along the gulf coast. As many of you may know, Tyndall Air Force Base is the home of the training for the F-22 and the F-15. The Joint Strike Fighter is going to be based up in that area, and if that prohibition were to be lifted, obviously, that would seriously impact, according to the military, the officials in the Pentagon, the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, the Secretary of Defense, all have said that the critical nature of that Gulf of Mexico training range will be seriously impacted and our military as a result will be impacted.

Mr. BOYD

Mr. BOYD. Mr. Speaker, I come tonight before the country to discuss the state of our Nation and to talk about a few of the things that I think that we can do to improve the state of the Nation. This hour that we will have tonight, there will be some other members of the Blue Dog Coalition that will join me, I am sure. Mr. Speaker, as you know, the Blue Dog Coalition is a group of 37 men and women from all over the country, Democratic Members that believe that there are certain things that we should do as a government, certain functions that we should perform to make the economic model work well, and we should try to perform those functions well, and we should be willing to pay for it. I was very interested in the previous speaker and actually agree with what some of the previous speaker said, and I think he wound up by saying that we ought to balance the budget. The Blue Dogs, Mr. Speaker, could not agree more that that is a very important step, and I think most Members, most folks out in the country would understand the concept or the notion of balancing the budget, whether it is our individual home budgets or whether it is our business budget, whether it is our local governments. Eventually, you have to have revenues meet expenditures, or you do not stay in business too long. Most of us understand that. Except in the Federal Government, we have a difficult time understanding it sometimes, and I think we have not done very well on that front in the last 6 years certainly. I was also interested in some of the comments made by the previous speaker. You would have thought that the Democrats were in control of the Congress of the United States. I would remind the Speaker that the White House, the House and the Senate are all controlled by the Republican party. When it comes to doing budgets and programs and balancing those budget and programs, that is certainly within the control of the majority party to do that. There also was a good bit of talk about the welfare program. Mr. Speaker, the welfare program was something that this Nation worked together on back in the 1990s under a Democratic President and Republican-led Congress, worked very hard, sat down in a bipartisan way and came up with a good solution to find ways to move people off of welfare and get them into the workplace. The previous speaker is absolutely right in that we need people in the workplace, getting paychecks, being productive, paying taxes into a society, and that way our economy works best and our lives are better. Mr. Speaker, I want to talk about three specific issues, three broad areas, basically, where I believe this administration and this Republican-led Congress have failed us in being responsible. Number one is they have failed to balance the budget. For 5 consecutive years now, we have had a budget that is out of balance. Number two, they have failed to manage our Federal Government and its functions effectively and efficiently. Let me say that again. They have failed to manage the Federal Government and its functions effectively and efficiently, and I want to talk specifically about that a little more. Thirdly, I believe that this administration and this Congress has failed to uphold the standards of honesty and accountability when it comes to perform their functions. Now, I want to start with the second of those particular bullet points and talk about the management of the Federal Government and point out some of the things that have been going on the last 5 to 6 years. When President Bush took office, he told us and we all knew that he came from a business world and with an MBA and with the charge that the government would be run like a business. Instead, Mr. Speaker, we have seen many of our Federal agencies managed by people with little or no experience. As a result, you find today 19 of the 23 Federal agencies are not in compliance with proper accounting standards. In other words, they cannot give a clean audit of their own actions in how and where they spent the money, the taxpayers' money that was given to them to perform their governmental function. What this means is that we cannot account for all of the government's assets and liability. The previous speaker talked about the Department of Defense being the biggest offender; and, in actuality, the Department of Defense is the largest offender of this. Of course, the Department of Defense is one of the largest agencies in the Federal Government, the largest agency in the Federal Government, and we all know the high-profile story of the over $3 billion that was allocated, appropriated for Iraq reconstruction that nobody can account for. The Department of Defense cannot account for the over $3 billion that was appropriated for Iraq reconstruction. The complete lack of management and accountability in our Federal agencies is unacceptable. If you had a manager that operated like that in your local government or in a business, you would replace that manager. So I think that we really should demand more of our executive agencies in terms of management and accountability as it relates to how they spend the money that is appropriated to that particular agency. In the 1990s, Mr. Speaker, Congress and the President, again a Democratic President, a Republican-led Congress working together in a bipartisan way enacted a series of reforms for the Federal civilian workforce known as the Readmission of Government. These reforms reduced the size of the Federal Government, Mr. Speaker, by over 300,000 employees. Let me say that again. In the 1990s, the size of the Federal Government was reduced by over 300,000 employees. Despite this reduction, many Federal agencies improved their performance substantially; and I want to talk about one of those Federal agencies specifically, I think, which is a good example. Because, Mr. Speaker, I come from Florida, and in Florida we are accustomed to natural disasters, primarily hurricanes that start about this time of year and run all the way through the summer and into the fall. Last year, I think we had so many hurricanes that we ran out of alphabetic names and had to start back through the alphabet a second time to name all the storms. I think there has been a lot of press and a lot of publicity about the storms that we have had. Florida has created an excellent emergency management system to deal with those storms, but we always work hand in glove with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is known as FEMA, and I found in my 18 years of public service in Florida that FEMA was one of the premier Federal agencies, really a professional agency that knew what its role was and knew how to get the job done probably more than any Federal agency I knew in the 1990s. It was the poster child, if you will, of a well-managed Federal agency. FEMA's structure was transformed, and three national response teams were created to quickly react to any national emergency. I guess in the 1990s, FEMA's performance was more notable for the newspaper stories that weren't written about it. Anytime you find an agency that is doing a good job, doing what it is supposed to be doing, then you do not hear much about it. Disaster victims and State officials alike, including myself, gave FEMA grade A marks, unanimous applause, if you will. Now we fast-forward 5 years, 6 years, we find FEMA in response to Hurricane Katrina an utter failure. Just last week or 2 weeks ago, you had a Senate committee with jurisdiction over FEMA stating that FEMA is so broken that that bipartisan committee, leadership of that committee, believes that it should be completely dismantled. How did we go in the late 1990s or in the 1990s from an agency that was acclaimed to be the most efficient and effective Federal agency to an agency that is almost dysfunctional today? Why do we have so many problems with FEMA? Well, maybe it is because the administration dismantled the three national response teams prior to Katrina, so there was no group of folks within FEMA ready to go at a moment's notice. Perhaps it was that FEMA was folded into a brand-new Department of Homeland Security and, by all accounts, became the dumping ground for the Department. Whatever these reasons are, I think every one of them point back to a management style or scheme or capability. One factor that certainly played a role in the change was that in the 1990s FEMA was run by professionals with strong emergency management experience at the State and local level. Let me say that again. In 1990, early 1990s, the previous administration brought in emergency management professionals with strong management experience at the State and local level, and they took FEMA and they transformed it into a world-class organization. However, under the current administration, until weeks ago, FEMA was run by political hacks with little or no emergency management experience. It is clear that on the fiscal and management fronts that this administration is failing the American people; and, as a result, you have agencies which cannot produce clean audits. They cannot tell you where the money was spent, the taxpayers' dollars that we are appropriating, and what was done with it. And that is one of the points that I want to make. The other point and the one I mentioned earlier was the balancing of the Federal budget. Now, the previous speaker spoke of that; and, actually, as I said earlier, we are in complete agreement, that the Federal budget should be balanced. I see that we have been joined by one of our fellow Blue Dogs, Representative Jim Cooper from Tennessee. Mr. Cooper serves in a role in the Blue Dogs where he chairs the policy committee and, as a result, has the task of leading us in developing of our policy positions. Mr. Cooper has done a lot of work on these issues, fiscal responsibility.

Mr. BOYD. Madam Speaker, I would like to call on my fellow Blue Dog from Tennessee, Mr. Cooper.

Mr. BOYD. So do I understand it to be Federal law that any business over $5 million has to use that accrual accounting procedure?

Mr. BOYD. Thank you, Mr. Cooper. A couple of things that you said struck me. One is, unsustainable; and the other is, we have to work together. Those of us who have been in this business, those of us who have any kind of accounting training in our background understand that those sorts of numbers, first of all, that reporting procedures, or those reporting procedures, are wrong; and the trend there of red ink, deficit spending, is unsustainable. It will be, and I think the public will recognize it when the markets begin to react to their fears that someday, if America doesn't turn around its habit or change its habit of deficit spending, that it will have difficulty sustaining itself economically. The other thing that struck me about what you said is what I call the bipartisanship thing. I want to go to this chart here, and this talks about the budget deficits from 1982 to 2006, a 24, 25-year period, starts with President Reagan back in 1982. And you see the minus numbers here, all the way down through the fourth year of the Clinton administration, or fifth year of the Clinton administration, in which, working together right in here, a Republican-led Congress and a Democratic President worked together for the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, which then produced a positive result that got the country back on the right track, at least in terms of its cash basis deficit issue. So you see that that was a very positive thing here. And the biggest issue we had in 2001, when President Bush was sworn into office, was how do we deal with the $5.6 trillion, 10-year projected surplus we had. We had a $5.6 trillion, trillion, now, projected surplus in 2001. Many of us, especially of those of us in the Blue Dogs said, hey, there are several things we can do. Number one is we ought to address these priorities related to Medicare and Social Security. We know those programs have long-term problems. Let's spend part of the money there. Let's use part of it to give back in tax breaks and let's use part of it to pay down this huge Federal debt that we had. But this Congress and this administration decided not to follow that sort of three-pronged approach, debt reduction, deal with Medicare and Social Security, and tax relief. Instead, they poured all the money into tax relief. And then immediately you see what happened. You had 9/ 11 come after that and an economic downturn, and then now we have got deficits. We have structural deficits. What does a structural deficit mean? It means that even if the economy works, everything works like it is supposed to, you are still going to have a deficit. You are still spending more money than you take in. That is wrong. That is fundamentally wrong. And we ought to, we have to correct it. We just can't afford to let it go on like this. America is the greatest country on the face of the earth economically, politically, militarily. We won't be that way long if we don't fix this very dangerous structural deficit that we have. We have been joined by another outstanding member of the Blue Dog Coalition. We come from all over the country. We have with us tonight Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez from California who has joined us now. She has been a leader. She is a member of the Armed Services Committee and a leader there; and I would like to yield at this time to my friend, Loretta Sanchez.

Mr. BOYD. I thank the gentlewoman from California for your leadership on these areas and particularly on the Armed Services Committee.

Mr. BOYD. If the gentleman would yield. I know the gentleman served in Congress prior to 1994 and is actually on his second trip back and was not here in 1997 when we did the 1997 Balanced Budget Act. But Congresswoman Sanchez and myself were. And one of the keys to that 1997 Balanced Budget Act which led us to balancing the budget here in this era was PAYGO. Spending caps was another key element of that. You put caps on spending programs, and you leave them there, and you agree upon that. Those are not here anymore, as you know, under this administration, this Republican-led Congress and Republican administration. Back then, it was President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican, and Majority Leader of the Senate, Trent Lott, a Republican, sat together and said how do we do this in a bipartisan way. You don't have any of that at work anymore. I think that is the thing that disappoints me more than anything, is I know that there are people of goodwill that would work in good faith all over this country that serve in this body that don't have that opportunity because we are not allowed to sit down. The majority party in many cases just won't sit down with us and work together to solve these problems. So these are very, very difficult solutions. I know the chart that showed the accrual accounting and the $2.7 trillion deficit, those are hard numbers to understand. Here is one that is not hard to understand. This is what you actually owe today. We owe as a government today $8.352 trillion. That is trillion with a T. $28,000 for every man, woman and child. That is what our debt is today. And somebody has to pay that back. We also have to pay the interest on that. We have to service that debt on a regular basis. And as the interest rates go up, then, obviously, that is what I call a debt tax which cannot be repealed. It has got to be paid.

Mr. BOYD. Madam Speaker, the fact is that some future Congress and some future President has a lot of hard, tough work to do, a lot of painful decisions to make to get us back in balance. It will be done somewhere down the road. We know that will happen, but it is going to be very painful.

Mr. BOYD. Madam Speaker, the gentlewoman makes a good point. In the past when we had to run up debt, for instance, during World War II and at other times in a national emergency, that debt in large part was bought by Americans. That financing was provided by Americans. That is not the case today. Of this over almost $3 trillion that has been borrowed since January 2001, the great bulk of it, the majority of it, has been lent to us by China and Japan. So in most cases, foreign countries, some not necessarily that are friendly to our cause, are lending us this money.

Mr. BOYD. I appreciate both of you folks being here today. One last thing that I wanted to talk about, the third point that I wanted to make, was the issue of honesty and accountability by the administration. We have to deal with the American people in all areas, and particularly our financial area, with honesty, and we have to be accountable. On the congressional side, our forefathers designed our system so that the congressional side would have an oversight role, that we would make the laws and appropriate the money, and our job was to make sure that the executive branch, the President and the executive agencies, spent the money and applied the laws in the way that we intended them to be. And I do not think that is happening as well as it should these days. And I want to cite a couple of examples. An article in Monday's Boston Globe reports that the administration has disregarded more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, adopting the policy that basically the administration has the authority to pick and choose a provision of which laws that they wish to follow. This is a blatant disregard for the way our forefathers set up our Federal Government and has really upset the balance between the branches of government, and it has prevented Congress from carrying out our responsibility of lawmaking and oversight. Let me cite an example of oversight abdication: from 1994, when President Clinton sat in the White House and the congressional House and the Senate were controlled by Republicans, there were over 1,000 subpoenas issued from 1994 to 2000, over 1,000 subpoenas issued to appear before House committees, under oath, to justify and explain actions of the administration. It is a role that Congress should be playing, an oversight role. Since January of 2001, there have been virtually no subpoenas issued by this House to this administration to explain their actions. And Congress has basically abdicated its oversight role. And as a result, you see misuse of power and some corruption springing up in places, and I think we will see more of that unless Congress steps up and exercises its role of oversight over the executive branch.

Mr. BOYD. That is a great point, and I thank the gentlewoman for making it. Madam Speaker, we have been joined by my good friend and fellow Blue Dog from Tennessee, Representative Lincoln Davis, and I yield to my friend now.

Mr. BOYD. Madam Speaker, reclaiming my time, I appreciate the gentleman. He brings a lot of common sense and wisdom. I know our time has expired, Madam Speaker. I just want to conclude by saying that I hope that you understand that the Blue Dogs are a group of men and women who are ready to work together across the aisle in a bipartisan way to solve these problems. We have some very, very tough problems, and we have a group of folks who are ready and willing to roll up our sleeves and go to work, and let's solve some of these problems.

Mr. BOYD

Mr. BOYD. Madam Chairman, I thank the gentleman. Is the basic adulteration standard to which the gentleman has referred the standard that the Federal Government or States would rely on to deal with the presence of unsafe levels of contaminants in food? Would that provision permit a State to take action against a terrorist threat to food supply?

Mr. BOYD. Madam Chairman, a lot of us are confused. There have been a lot of allegations coming from all directions. There are folks who oppose the bill, that have produced a list of 77 State laws that would purportedly be nullified under this bill. If the gentleman would, is that an accurate portrayal of the effects of this bill?

Mr. BOYD. Madam Chairman, I want to thank the gentleman from Georgia for yielding time to me to enter in a colloquy so that we may clarify certain parts of this. I, and other Members, would like to be certain that we understand how this bill affects State food safety laws. It is my understanding that the bill contains a list of 10 provisions of Federal food safety laws and that State law dealing with the same subject as the Federal law is required to be identical to the Federal law. Is my understanding correct?

Mr. BOYD. I yield to the gentleman from Georgia.

Mr. BOYD. Madam Chairman, I thank the gentleman for his clarification. Am I correct in also understanding that virtually all of the State laws that relate to the sections of Federal law listed in the bill are identical to Federal law already?

Mr. BOYD. Madam Chairman, I thank the gentleman for that comprehensive and reassuring response. I agree there is a lot of confusion about the bill, and we do not clearly understand the effects on State law and authority. I am satisfied, however, that the bill properly preserves the ability of States to take action to protect consumers, while ensuring that food safety policies will be uniform and scientifically based, and I thank the gentleman for his time.

Mr. BOYD

Mr. BOYD. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my friend and colleague, Mr. Matheson from Utah, who is our distinguished leader of the Blue Dogs, a group, Mr. Speaker, that I am very proud to be a member of. I joined when I first came to Congress in January of 1997, and I am proud of the work that they do in trying to bring to the attention of the country and of the Congress the importance of the economic model and making sure that the government meets its obligations to the community and is willing to pay for those obligations. Mr. Speaker, we live in the greatest country on the face of the Earth. I like to tell my constituents back home when I speak to Kiwanis Clubs or civic clubs that we have 5 percent of the world's population. That is about one of every 20 people in the world live in America. And we control 25 percent of the world's wealth. We got into that position in a relatively short period of time. It is less than 230 years this year we have been a Nation, and we have done it by creating an economic model that is unsurpassed in the world. That economic model really to me, when you break it down, does one thing. It always strives to expand the middle class and move as many people as you can out of the bottom rung and into the middle class where they can be productive members of our society. In the process, you narrow the gap between the very rich and the very poor; and that served us well over the years. I remember talking to my parents when I got old enough to register to vote and asked them about why they happened to be registered Democrats. And they said, well, they thought that, coming out of the Depression in the 1920s and 1930s, that the Democratic party under the leadership of Franklin Delano Roosevelt really laid the groundwork for making this country the greatest economic and military machine on the face of the Earth. Expand the middle class, Mr. Speaker, to expand the middle class you have to have a well-educated and healthy population, and those are functions that our government has to be involved in. We have to be providing a good educational system for our children. We have to ensure, if we are going to stay competitive in the world, Mr. Speaker, that each generation is better educated than the previous generation. You have to have a good health retirement system. You have to have a good income retirement system. Prior to the implementation of Social Security and Medicare in this country, if you reached the age of retirement, age 65 in America, there was a great chance, over a 50 percent chance, that you would be below the poverty level. Less than 10 percent of our folks today live below the poverty level because of this great economic model that we have created which strives to expand the middle class. Social Security and Medicare were important components of that. Why do I talk about the expansion of the middle class and the economic model? This government has a budget which talks about how it funds its community responsibilities, community obligations, and that budget proposal was just presented by the administration to Congress in the last couple of weeks. And that budget proposal for the coming fiscal year which starts on October 1 proposes to spend $2.47 trillion. Let me say that again. It proposes to spend $2.47 trillion. But its collections to pay for that $2.47 trillion amount to $2.15 trillion. That is a budget deficit of approximately $318 billion. That is after we spend all of the Social Security surplus masking the much larger deficit. But the problems do not stop there. The budget does not even address the costs of the war effort in the Middle East, in Iraq and Afghanistan, in the coming year. It does not address some other issues which we know as a Congress and a Nation that we have to address, such as the alternative minimum tax exploration and some other tax issues like that. So what we have before us as a Congress presented by the administration is a budget that really is not a very useful document for us to start with. Mr. Speaker, my wife and I own a farm, a family farm that has been in my family for over 175 years. And it is not always easy on the farm. It is a small business. And this past week at home I spent a good part of the week doing a budget. Why do I do a budget? I do my budget to take to my creditors so they can provide us the funds we need to run our little small business. I spent a good many days on that budget and did the very best I could to present to my creditors just as accurate a picture as possible of what I thought the revenues would be and the expenses would be for the coming year. That is honesty in budgeting. And out there in the country our constituents have to do it in running their own homes. They do it in running their own businesses, and they certainly have to do it in running their own local governments and school boards. We certainly could expect that the Federal Government could be honest in presenting this budget to the American people. So I would hope, Mr. Speaker, and I would ask my colleagues to join in as we have this discussion about accountability and honesty in budgeting, that we can as a Congress be a little more honest with the American people about what the cost of some of these programs are that we are involved in and how we are going to pay for them. I do know something for a fact, Mr. Speaker, that you cannot increase spending, cut taxes and cut the deficit all in one lick. The math does not does not work. I learned that in grade school. It is a simple mathematical calculation. You cannot increase spending, cut taxes, and decrease the deficit. It just cannot be done, and that is what evidently this budget pretends to do. So I hope as we so have this discussion for the next 30 minutes or so that we can delve into some of these issues and have a little straight talk. Let us shoot straight with the American people about what the budget issues are.

Mr. BOYD. Absolutely we do do that. I think most people who run a small business understand that. Most folks who run local governments understand that. But there is something else in this budget that we are looking at that we received from the administration in the last few days that really belies any thought of sensibility. A couple of examples: the veterans medical portion of the budget, we know those are issues that we have to deal with and we have not dealt with very well in the past. In that budget that we were presented are significant fees, increases in copayments that the veterans will have to pay. The Congress has rejected that soundly over all the years that I have been here. So I would not expect that the Congress would increase the fees on the veterans; but yet that is in the President's proposal that he sent up. Student loans cut significantly. I do not think Congress is likely to cut student loans. I certainly hope they are not, but that is in the budget. Those are the kinds of things that we ought to be honest with the American people about, what the costs are, and how are we going to raise the money to make sure those costs are paid for.

Mr. BOYD. Mr. Speaker, I know this accountability issue is one that we are all very concerned about. I saw some reports today that in the FEMA response to the Katrina and Rita disasters and other storms of 2005, which were dreadful and particularly dreadful for the people on the gulf coast, but one of the tools they used to help the folks was a $2,000 credit card that FEMA passed out. I read some reports today that many of those, maybe as many as 30 or 40 percent of those credit cards, were received with fraudulent Social Security information; and, also, the expenses on some of those cards were for some very unreasonable items like tattoos and massages and things that we would not think that necessarily the taxpayer ought to be paying for. So we do need oversight, and one of the things that I am hopeful for is the majority party in this body had an election here a week or so ago, and there is a new majority leader on the Republican side here. It is my hope and I am sure the hope of the Blue Dogs that we can work with him in a way that we have not been able to work with the leaders in the past to try to address some of these issues, because this issue of one-party rule and lack of oversight into the administration's activities is costing the American people greatly. I think it is time that we addressed it and try to do something about it.

Mr. BOYD. Mr. Speaker, you can foresee a situation that would put us in a dependent situation with agriculture and funding like we are with oil. For instance, I think 60 percent or so of our oil consumption in this country comes from another part of the world. Many of those people, like you said earlier, do not necessarily have our best interests at heart. So we have it within our own ability to stay out of that situation with the economics, and we really need to get this turned around and stop this deficit spending to the tune of 400 or $500 billion a year. If we do not, then we can foresee a situation down the road where it could be an economic wreck here.

Mr. BOYD. Mr. Speaker, I think you said it very well. We do have a tendency here to be very selfish, this generation, unlike the Greatest Generation, which came out of World War II and paved the way for us to be a great country. But the Blue Dogs have a plan. We have a plan that talks about some very basic principles that would put this country back on sound footing in terms of its budgeting for its government and funding its priorities, and would the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Matheson) care to share those points with us?

Mr. BOYD

Mr. BOYD. Madam speaker, I want to thank my friend from Arkansas for organizing this hour to give the Blue Dogs a chance to talk to the Nation about our 12-point plan. I came here 9 years ago and have been a part of the Blue Dog Coalition since that time and am real proud of the work that they do in trying to bring a message to this Congress and to the country that fiscal responsibility and fiscal discipline does matter. Now, as our friend from Arkansas, Congressman Ross, said earlier, he grew up in a small town in Arkansas. I grew up in a small rural community in North Florida just right on the Georgia border, a little community, 3,000 people or so, grew up on a farm. My wife and I still live today on that farm. I spent all of my adult life as a business person, and, Madam Speaker, one of the things that I learned a long time ago was the lesson that all of our business people out there understand, our government leaders and even those who are not running a business, but are running households, that fiscal responsibility does matter. We always have to be conscious of our fiscal condition no matter what kind of operation we are running. And indeed, this U.S. Congress and the administration are running the largest business, almost a $2.5 trillion business. That is about the budget, about the average annual U.S. Government budget now. And we are running about a $350 billion annual deficit. Now, Madam Speaker, I got into politics back about 17 years ago, and one of the reasons that I chose to run for public office was because I was concerned about some of our governments, State and particularly Federal governments, spending more money as a matter of practice than they took in on an annual basis. And so I got into the State legislature, and I watched the Federal Government build annual spending deficits of almost $300 billion. I think the number in 1992 was about $290 billion, at which point the American people finally said this is not right, we ought to do something about this. Pursuant to that 1992 Presidential election, the United States Government, under a Democratic President and a Republican-run Congress, later on House and Senate after 1994, worked really hard on eliminating that Federal annual deficit. And it went from $290 billion. It was not easy. A lot of sacrifice. A lot of pain. A lot of programs cut, and it was necessary, led by, at that time, President Clinton. We moved from in 1992 a $290 billion annual deficit, and in a short 8 years later, we actually had an annual surplus. $290 billion annual deficit in 1992. In 2000 we had an annual surplus; our U.S. Government budget was right. What has happened since then? We have gone from an annual surplus and a $5.6 trillion debt in 2001, when we had the last one, this administration came into office, to today where we have about a $350 billion annual deficit. As you see there on the chart, a debt amassed at over $8.1 trillion dollars, $27,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. You know, ladies and gentlemen, Madam Speaker, we know what we have to do to eliminate this deficit and start reducing this debt. We cannot do it all at once. It takes a lot of hard work. We want to use the model that President Clinton and the Republican-led Congress in 1997 put together. And that is what the Blue Dogs are trying to convince the leaders of the Congress and the administration today, is that it has to come together in a bipartisan way. We have to work together. We cannot continue to try to move policies strictly on a polarized and partisan basis. I am real honored to be here tonight. Again, I thank the gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Ross) for putting this together. But I believe that the most important thing we can do in that 12-step plan is to put a provision in our Constitution that requires us to balance our budget. Otherwise, sometimes maybe the Congress, the administration, do not have the will to do it. So that is one of the points that we should be talking about tonight, and that is a constitutional requirement for a balanced budget. We had many votes on that prior to 2001, prior to the current administration coming in to office. We had many votes on the House floor to put in the Constitution a balanced budget. But I do not think we have had any since 2001. So I look forward to the discussion tonight. I yield to the gentleman from Arkansas.