Mick Mulvaney

Mr. MULVANEY

Mr. MULVANEY. Mr. Chairman, I have had my say. I move approval. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. MULVANEY. Mr. Chair, I have an amendment at the desk. I indicated before, I have had my say. We are going to go through the motions on the next three.

Mr. MULVANEY of South Carolina

Mr. MULVANEY of South Carolina. Mr. Chair, I have four consecutive amendments that are all very closely intertwined. There are actually four simply for procedural matters that I offered originally as one. I am going to argue all of them together essentially at one time because this is what they do: they get rid of the OCO budget. That is it. They get rid of the OCO budget. Title IV of this bill is the OCO budget, and my amendments seek to simply be done with this thing. Mr. Chair, it has turned into a slush fund. That is not me saying that, by the way. That is folks from both Republican and Democrat administrations, together, saying that is what this is. It may have started with the best of intentions. It may have started out of absolute necessity. It may have been a good thing when it started, but we all know what it is now, which is a place to hide money and a way to get around spending caps. That is it. Mr. Chair, I hope I get a chance over the course of the next couple of appropriations bills to talk more about the OCO and more about specific examples of how it is abused. We actually now admit that we abuse it. We admit that there is money in the OCO budget that has nothing to do with overseas contingency operations. We admit that there is money in the OCO budget right now that has nothing to do with waging war overseas. We admit that we abuse this particular account. Why? Because we can and because it is very difficult to vote against the troops. That is not the right way to appropriate money. John McCain, a man with whom I usually disagree on many, many things, has actually said this is not the way to appropriate money for MILCON-VA, for the DOD. For anything that has to do with defense, this is not the proper way to do it. Mr. Chair, in fact, as we look at the individual sections, it gets even worse. In this first section that deals with the Army, we are appropriating $18.9 million for no one knows what. There is no indication whatsoever as to what we are spending this money on. The language is very straightforward. It reads that we are going to go and appropriate $18.9 million to remain available until September 30, 2021, for projects outside the United States. Period. That is it. $19 million with absolutely no indication of where it is being spent. In fact, we don't even have to spend it next year. We can spend it anytime we want to over the next 5 years. As long as it is outside of the United States, we are approving its expenditure. By the way, you can go down to the next line where the same is true of the $59.8 million for the Marine Corps construction, of the $88.2 million for the Air Force construction, and then of the $5 million for military construction defensewide. There is no indication of how this money is being spent. There is no limitation on when it is spent other than we have to spend it in 5 years, and there is no indication on where it is going to be spent other than it has to be outside of the United States. That is it. It is hard for me to imagine an example of a less accountable, a less transparent way for us to spend money in this country. I have been spending some time on this for the last couple of years. I have always thought that this was a bad way for us to operate. I know that, every single year, we gather a couple more in adherence to that belief. We get a couple more votes every single year--folks who are finally waking up to the fact that, listen, we need to spend money on the military, that we need to spend money on the defense of this Nation. It is one of the few things we are affirmatively charged with in our Constitution, but this is not the way to do it. We can't lie to people back home about how much money we are spending. We can't lie to people back home about what the deficit is going to be. We certainly can't lie to them about where they are spending their money. Let's stop doing it this way and start doing it properly. Mr. Chair, for that reason, I encourage the support for this amendment. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. MULVANEY

Mr. MULVANEY. Is it possible, with the approval of the gentleman who is controlling the time for the majority, to combine amendment Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 4 into a single amendment?

Mr. MULVANEY. Mr. Chair, parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. MULVANEY. Mr. Chair, I have an amendment at the desk. Actually, I have four consecutive amendments at the desk.

Mr. MULVANEY of South Carolina

Mr. MULVANEY of South Carolina. Mr. Chair, that was the quickest 25 pages I have heard in a long time. Amendment Offered by Mr. Mulvaney

Mr. MULVANEY of South Carolina. Where are we?

Mr. MULVANEY of South Carolina. Mr. Chair, parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. MULVANEY

Mr. MULVANEY. Actually, I have been showing them that chart since you and I arrived in 2011 because the number has not changed significantly. When you and I arrived and served on the Budget Committee together in 2011, we could have told people roughly what the deficit would have been this year. The projections have not changed.

Mr. MULVANEY. The 40-year rolling average is about 6 percent. That is what money ordinarily costs the United States of America. It is about 6 percent if you look at it over a generational length of time. If we simply regress to the mean and end up with money costing us about 6 percent, you are talking about more than $1 trillion a year in just interest payments.

Mr. MULVANEY. There is no question. At $16 trillion of debt, roughly, which is the public debt now, you are talking about interest rates below 2 percent.

Mr. MULVANEY. It is also the benefit of a totally accommodating Federal Reserve, who sets the price of interest through things like quantitative easing, which is nothing more than printing money. They have unnaturally depressed rates. Depressed interest rates is nothing more than the cost of money. One of the direct beneficiaries of that has been this body. It has been much easier for us to run of these huge deficits--which is the annual debt--and the overall debt, simply because it is essentially been free money for the last 6 or 7 years.

Mr. MULVANEY. Mr. Schweikert, would you like to wager a guess as to the likelihood of that reduction staying in law is?

Mr. MULVANEY. You talked about how every day we wait, it gets harder to do. I remember giving a presentation similar to this at a retirement community in my neighborhood. It was back during one of the first Ryan budgets when we had actually talked about raising the benefit age slowly by a couple of months. There was a gentleman there who was in his late fifties. He said: Look, I don't want to work another 2 or 3 years. I said: Sir, we are not asking you to do that. He said: What are you asking me? I said: I am asking you to work an extra month. I am asking me to work an extra year. I am asking my triplets to work an extra 2, but I am only asking you to work an extra month. Can't you do that? He said: Of course, I can do that. Will that fix things? I said: That will go a long way towards fixing things. He got angry that it was that easy and nobody had explained it to him. I said: You are going to get even angrier. If we had done it 20 years ago, it would be a week. If we wait another 20 years, you can never fix it.

Mr. MULVANEY. And so what happens on that date?

Mr. MULVANEY. It happens.

Mr. MULVANEY. How many people have called your office to say: Mr. Schweikert, what is your plan for fixing this?

Mr. MULVANEY. Mr. Schweikert, there is an ad campaign on television right now that speaks to this. I think it was on during the Super Bowl. It shows a very dramatic bridge scene and the bridge slowly fades into decay, and it says: This is what will happen to our economy. This is what will happen to our infrastructure because of entitlement spending. Some folks don't like that term, but we use it here for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and so forth. It says: Demand of the Presidential candidates what their plan is to solve this problem. Call or write your Member of Congress and demand what their plan is. I have gotten one call. Have you gotten any?

Mr. MULVANEY. Could have been at Mr. Buck's age.

Mr. MULVANEY. That is a great investment right now. Yeah.

Mr. MULVANEY. Do we actually pay that or we assume that?

Mr. MULVANEY. Wow.

Mr. MULVANEY. Yeah. The trust fund is actually fairly simple. A lot of people think that it doesn't exist. They think it is a myth. It is real. What it represents is the accumulated excess collections that Social Security has made over the years. I tell people that the last time we really had a major overhaul of Social Security was back in the 1980s. Ever since then, we have taken more money in every month in Social Security taxes, FICA, than we have paid out in benefits. So if you take $100 in in a particular month and only spend $80, you have $20 left over. That is the money that goes into the trust fund. It is essentially a savings account. Now, when people say, oh, it doesn't really exist, you have stolen money from it, and it is not there, that is not true. You can't keep $20, real paper money, in an account someplace, in a desk. That would be foolish. What we do is we invest in the only thing the Social Security Administration is allowed to invest in, which is U.S. treasuries. There is actually in excess of $2 trillion in the trust fund. The trust fund exists. It is in a drawer in West Virginia in a building named after Senator Byrd, as most of the buildings are in West Virginia. It is full of treasuries.

Mr. MULVANEY. No. That is us, actually.