Mick Mulvaney

Mr. MULVANEY

Mr. MULVANEY. I have an amendment at the desk, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. MULVANEY. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. MULVANEY. I want to briefly begin by thanking the Appropriations Committee. I understand the nature of what has been happening here, the size of the taxpayer savings that we have seen over the last 3 days. But I rise because the debt and the deficit problem facing our Nation are greater than I think most people in this room understand, and certainly most people back home understand. The circumstances demand that we go just a little bit further than we have and that's what this amendment does. It goes just a little bit further. It takes non-defense discretionary spending back to 2006 levels instead of 2008. That represents an additional 3 percent savings, which on the one hand doesn't sound like that much, but on the other hand actually saves $134 billion of the $900 billion worth of deficits that we will incur between tomorrow and the rest of this year. Folks have asked me why I have done this, why I have waited 3 years to do it, why we are here at 1 o'clock in the morning to hear this amendment. I am doing it because I feel that most of the folks don't grasp the size of the difficulty. I know that most of the folks in my district don't grasp it yet. And I have been struggling with how to explain to people exactly what a $1,600 billion deficit means and a $14,000 billion debt. This chart, I think, does it better than anything else. This chart is something that we put together using Congressional Budget Office numbers from the base line. This number, very simply, ladies and gentlemen, shows when we will use 100 percent of our revenues, 100 percent of our revenues, to pay our debt. And that number, using the CBO estimates, is in 2055. This is the equivalent of going back to your family and saying everything that we make will go to pay down the minimum payment on our credit card. And this number is probably too late. The CBO estimates on interest are much lower than we are actually experiencing in the market these days. The scary part is that if we don't do anything, if we continue business as usual, this will happen. This will happen unless we make dramatic changes to the way that we do business around here. I heard the gentleman from Virginia earlier today, Mr. Moran, mention that he thought that H.R. 1 represented an economic death spiral. This, ladies and gentlemen, is an economic death spiral. There is no coming back from a situation where you use all of your money just to pay your debt. We can and will begin work on this this year in the budget. We can and will continue work on this as we go through the debt ceiling debate. And we can and should keep this in mind with everything that we do. But in my humble opinion, we can start tonight by approving this amendment. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. MULVANEY

Mr. MULVANEY. Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 87, I inadvertently missed the two-minute rollcall No. 87 on February 17, 2011. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yes.''

Mr. MULVANEY

Mr. MULVANEY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I rise in favor of the resolution. I am just happy to be able to have this debate this year. I can tell you, Madam Speaker, that we were campaigning last year during 2010. As freshmen, we never expected to have the ability to come into this Chamber this year and talk about the FY 2011 spending. We thought that that would be long before we had gotten here, and I thank my colleagues from across the way for failing to pass a budget last year so that we have the opportunity to have this debate with this new Congress. For me--and I know, Madam Speaker, for many of my colleagues--the key language in this resolution is 2008 levels or less. It's that ``or less'' that, I think, has a lot of the attention of the freshmen. In a world where discretionary spending is up 88 percent in the last 2 years, in a world where we have borrowed $3 trillion in just the last 2 years, in a world, Madam Speaker, where we borrowed more money in one day--we borrowed more money on June 30, 2010, than we borrowed in all of 2006--in that world, those two words ``or less'' are what speak to me and so many Members of the freshman class. I thank the Rules Committee, and especially the chairman, for making sure that language is in there, and I am looking forward to exploring that when this bill comes to the floor.

Mr. MULVANEY

Mr. MULVANEY. Madam Speaker, I rise in favor of H.R. 2. It is hard to know where to begin when you are talking about how bad the current health care legislation is for small businesses. The current health care bill that this Congress passed last year has an incentive for businesses to go from 50 employees to 49. It has an incentive for businesses to go from 25 employees down to fewer, and it has a disincentive then for small businesses to grow. There is a financial incentive to pay your employees less because the tax credit that we talked so much about last year goes away as you pay your folks more. In fact, it is almost as if the folks who wrote this piece of legislation last year either have no idea how small business works or they don't care how small business works. Either way, the current health care legislation is a complete disaster for small business, and the number one priority for small business this year should be repealing of the existing health care and passing of H.R. 2.

Mr. MULVANEY. I rise in favor of this bill. I can't tell you how excited I am to hear the language coming from the other side of the Chamber this evening. I am hearing discussions about the importance of cutting deficits and the importance of keeping spending in line. It makes me wonder, Mr. Speaker, what has been happening here for the last several years. At least when it comes to this side of the aisle, I think we have been consistent with that message over the course of this debate. I don't know where the other side was when we got the information that said this bill actually cost trillions of dollars. I don't know where this attitude about being fiscally responsible was when we got information from the chief actuary at Medicare and Medicaid who said this bill was unsustainable in its spending. I don't know where they were with this attitude when we heard from that same body that this bill actually raised the cost of health care versus not passing the bill. But, Mr. Speaker, I am extraordinarily excited to hear this level of discussion because, as a member of the Budget Committee, I look forward to this level of debate continuing beyond this bill, beyond the health care discussion and into the upcoming discussion on the budget because my guess is if we have this level of discussion on health care, then the budget will be an easy, easy debate this year, and we will be able to make dramatic inroads to cutting our spending.