David Price

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. Now I am happy to recognize the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Scott), a Member who has long studied Federal budgets and understands very well the dire situation that we are facing.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. If the gentleman will yield, the debt tax was on the way down because the interest payments on the national debt naturally go down as the debt itself is paid off. We had begun paying the debt off. But as that chart seems to indicate, those are on the way right back up, over $200 billion a year in money that I think all of us could think of more productive ways to spend than paying interest on the debt.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for a very convincing demonstration of where we have been and where, unfortunately, it appears we are going, unless we take corrective action. The gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Van Hollen) is one of our new Members, who is already actively participating in the work of this body. We are happy to have him as part of this Special Order here tonight. I yield to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Van Hollen).

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the recollection of the President's quote about not passing along problems to future generations. We had a little more candid quote from the director of OMB the other day, Mr. Daniels, who said, ``We have returned to an era of deficits, but we ought not hyperventilate about this issue.'' Well, I do not see anybody hyperventilating here tonight, but what I have heard tonight from the gentleman from Maryland is a passionate and persuasive case for confronting this budget issue and getting our fiscal house in order, getting back on the right track, so I appreciate very much his contribution to our discussion. I am happy to yield to the gentlewoman from Santa Barbara, California (Mrs. Capps), a treasured colleague, for her remarks on this situation that we are facing.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I and a number of colleagues wish to address this body and the American people this evening on our country's fiscal situation and the decisions facing Congress as we propose a budget for the 2004 fiscal year. We speak with some urgency, and I think colleagues will sense that, because our situation has worsened drastically, and we are convinced that the President's 2004 budget would move our country dramatically in the wrong direction. In the minutes to follow, we will elaborate on our concerns and explain on the alternative course that we should be taking. Mr. Speaker, just 3 years ago, the Federal budget achieved its first surplus that did not rely on either the Social Security trust fund surplus or the Medicare surplus in many, many years. In fact, in the last years of the Clinton administration, we actually paid down $400 billion of the publicly held debt. This first chart tells the story: the deepening deficits in the 1980s, the climb out of deficit spending that occurred after the historic 1993 budget vote, and then, in the last years of the Clinton administration, a surplus, almost unheard of in this postwar period. This surplus enabled us to pay down a portion of the publicly held debt and to look forward to being able to meet the obligations of Social Security and Medicare as the baby boomers retire. This situation, unfortunately, has now drastically reversed. As this chart indicates, we have in this second Bush administration a plunge into deficit spending that breaks the record set in the first Bush administration and promises red ink as far as the eye can see. After just 2 years in office, the Bush administration would spend the entire Medicare surplus, the entire Social Security surplus, and would pile up trillions in the debt we once set out to retire. Never in our country's history have we had a fiscal reversal of this magnitude. The next charts will make that especially clear. We had, at the start of this administration, a projected $5.6 trillion surplus over the next 10 years. That surplus now is not only gone--and you see here the successive projections as our fiscal situation worsened. Now we are looking at no surplus and, in fact, at a $2.1 trillion deficit for that same 10-year period. That is a fiscal reversal of almost $8 trillion, unprecedented in our country's history. The deficit for 2003 is projected to be over $300 billion and for 2004 around $307 billion. The next chart shows those same figures with the Social Security and Medicare surpluses removed. Of course, that makes the situation even more alarming, because when you remove the cushion of the Social Security and Medicare surpluses which the Bush budgets would spend in their entirety over the next 10 years, the hole is even deeper. Where we were formerly looking at a $3 trillion on-budget surplus over the next 10 years, we are now looking at a $4.4 trillion deficit. This chart indicates what happens to trust fund revenues. The red bars are the Social Security surplus. The yellow bars are the Medicare surplus. The olive bars are the deficit beyond these surpluses. The Bush budget plans to spend those surpluses entirely and to borrow considerably beyond that. All this is going to add to the national debt. We are going to add some $2 trillion to the national debt in the next 5 years. Some Members will recall that at the end of the Clinton administration, we were talking about actually retiring the publicly held debt by 2008. There was even some debate about whether we could fully pay it down. Well, you can forget about that debate, because now we have a $5 trillion publicly held debt predicted for 2008. As many speakers have already said this evening, that will not only be a huge burden on future generations but it will also sap our annual budgets, because we are going to have to pay an additional $1.5 trillion in money down the rat hole in interest on that publicly held debt. This will amount to a debt tax, d-e-b-t tax of more than $200 billion a year for the forseeable future. That comes to about $4,500 per year for the average family, and it is rising. This chart indicates how that debt tax, the accumulated debt taxes, will grow by $1.5 trillion by virtue of these projected Federal deficits and the piling up of debt. Unfortunately, in the face of the worst fiscal reversal in the Nation's history, what is the response of the Bush administration? The response is actually to propose more of the same failed policies. The budget proposes $1.5 trillion in new tax cuts, every penny of which is funded by increased government debt, and when we add the interest costs, those new tax proposals, on top of the old ones, come to almost $2 trillion. These tax cuts mainly benefit the wealthiest taxpayers in this country. They will not only increase the deficit, but they will restrict the money available for education, for the environment, and for transportation, health care, and law enforcement. In fact, Mr. Speaker, this Bush budget gives us the worst of both worlds. It take us over the cliff fiscally, but then it actually underfunds critical domestic priorities. We know, for example, that our States are flat on their back fiscally. Our next speaker will elaborate on that. The No Child Left Behind Act passed with great bipartisan enthusiasm. But it is not funded in the President's budget proposal, leaving the states to their own devices. Homeland Security has been underfunded in the 2003 budget. The President promised $3.5 billion in additional funding for first responders, but then taking the money away from conventional law enforcement grants, leaving the states with less than a billion dollars in new money. The most obvious way to help the States from the federal level would be to increase the cost sharing percentage temporarily on Medicaid. But just this week the President reiterated that he has no intention of doing that. So the States can forget it when it comes to any relief from their fiscal distress. We may be faced with a situation of cutting taxes here at the Federal level and having like amounts reimposed by the States to meet their obligations, and that of course would mean that the net stimulative effect was zero. So, Mr. Speaker, by proposing a budget that mandates enormous deficits into the indefinite future while cutting important domestic priorities, this administration utterly fails to meet the fiscal challenges facing our Nation, and I and my colleagues participating in this special order wish to elaborate on where the Bush budget would take us. First we will hear from a new Member of this body who has significant experience in politics and in government and is already making his mark, the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Emanuel).

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Virginia for a very useful look at a number of critical items in the President's 2004 budget. I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Tierney), our esteemed colleague.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield to my colleague, the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Etheridge), who served as our superintendent for instruction and therefore knows our education budget very, very well, but also has been a very strong spokesman in this body for fiscal responsibility.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his contribution with respect to Impact Aid, a subject we have heard about tonight. That certainly is a deficiency in the President's budget. I am happy to yield the remainder of our time to the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt), the chairman of our Committee on the Budget, for whom I am substituting tonight. He has been tied up in a meeting. We are glad to have him here on the floor to wrap up this Special Order with his own insights.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for contributing to the Special Order.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, there is no Member better qualified than the gentlewoman from California to speak to the nursing shortage and to the deficiencies in this budget with respect to nursing education. So she has done all of us a service in pointing this out, and we appreciate very much her contribution. It is now my pleasure to yield to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Moran), a member of the Committee on Appropriations and the Committee on the Budget.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I especially appreciate the gentleman's pointing out the plight of the States and the tongue-in- cheek advice to how the States might improve their situation. Of course we had the Governors here in Washington this week, the Governors from both parties. Is there any indication they got any satisfaction at all from the President?

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I ask the gentleman, is it not true that a number of the items under discussion were things that the Federal Government has mandated?

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, for example, the education reforms under No Child Left Behind.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, of course there has been a good deal of help promised in the homeland security area, particularly for upfitting and getting better equipment, better communications capacity for first responders, for fire and emergency medical and police. The Republican Governors went to the White House and apparently came away empty-handed. It seemed even they had a hard time putting a good face on this.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for calling this Special Order today and for his and the gentleman from Utah's (Mr. Matheson) efforts to make certain colleagues have an opportunity to pay tribute to our dear friend Wayne Owens. Madam Speaker, Wayne Owens bade the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Davis) and me farewell on December 17th after we had traveled through the Middle East together for 7 intense days. He planned to take that same flight the next evening. But the next day Wayne suffered a massive heart attack, collapsed and died while walking on the beach in Tel Aviv. Our shock and consternation upon hearing the news a mere 24 hours after he had put us on that flight were acute, but these emotions were widely shared among Wayne's many friends, the Utah constituents he served during two distinguished stints in the United States House of Representatives, and the admirers of his path-breaking work since 1989 with the Center for Middle East Peace and Economic Cooperation. Wayne's background included 6 years of service for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, including work as a missionary in France. In Washington, he served on the staffs of Senators Frank Moss, Robert Kennedy, and Edward Kennedy. He gave up his House seat for an unsuccessful Senate race in 1974 and then returned to the House in the class of 1986, where I and others in that class came to know him as an accomplished and supportive colleague. He left for another Senate run in 1992 but in the meantime had found his true calling in his work in the Middle East. This was hardly a predictable path in terms of his personal and professional background, but it was one to which he was drawn by his experience on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, his friendship with Daniel Abraham, with whom he organized the Center for Middle East Peace in 1989, and by his vision of what a small, independent and creative organization might achieve in this political and policy thicket. Wayne, Danny Abraham, and the various Middle East hands and political leaders working with the Center were actively involved in the discussions leading to the Madrid and Oslo agreements, and they found numerous ways of encouraging the Israeli-Syrian and Israeli-Palestinian negotiations of the 1990s. Wayne was haunted by the knowledge of how close to resolution those efforts had come only to collapse into distrust and violence. He had few illusions about the obstacles to getting peace negotiations back on track. Still he persevered, always looking for the openings, the confluences of interest, the glimmers of hope that could be acted and built upon. He was one of the most determined and dedicated persons I have ever known. Wayne's approach was mirrored in the trip we took in December. We met with the heads of state in Syria, Lebanon, and Israel, demonstrating again the remarkable access and the relationships of respect that Wayne and the Center had developed across the political spectrum in Israel, in the Palestinian community, and in most Arab states. But many of our visits were more narrowly targeted to learn about and to encourage promising initiatives that are under way. For example, we met in Cairo with Chief of Intelligence General Omar Seuliman regarding the next round of cease-fire talks to be brokered by Egypt among Hamas, Fatah, and possibly other groups. We then visited chief Palestinian Authority negotiator Abu Mazen on the day it was determined that he would personally attend this second round. We met with Palestinian Authority Finance Minister Salam Fayyad regarding financial and budget reform, where there has been enough progress to allow the U.S. to broker the release of a first installment of Palestinian Authority revenues impounded by Israel. We talked with Sari Nusseibeh, head of Jerusalem Affairs for the PLO, about the back-channel, unofficial peace initiatives undertaken by him and others. Wayne specialized in discussions of these sorts, which bore witness to his remarkable understanding of the politics of the region and of the many facets of peacemaking, his conviction that fact-finding for himself or others required diverse sources, and his realization that the encouragement offered, the feedback given, the information exchanged, in such off-the-record sessions could be significant. As a middle-ranking member of this House, I have found such repeated visits, and my work with Wayne and the center generally, invaluable as a source of information and insight and as an avenue for engagement. Wayne was passionately committed to the security and integrity of Israel and to justice and self-determination for the Palestinians. He understood well the relation between those two and the unlikelihood of forward movement without persistent American engagement. The achievement of a comprehensive peace among Israel and its neighbors is a compelling cause in its own right, but it is one given additional urgency by the need for regional cooperation and support in combating terrorism and in disarming Iraq. With Wayne Owens' passing, we have lost one of our country's most determined and resourceful contributors to this cause. It is critically important for those of us who understand the value of his work to find ways to carry it forward.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me time. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of the motion to recommit, which our distinguished colleague from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) will be offering. Today's vote represents a fork in the road of Federal budgeting. We must decide whether to continue down the path of deeper budget deficits or to take those first difficult steps toward returning to a balanced budget. The pay-as-you-go rule expired at the end of fiscal year 2002. However, PAYGO sequestration for prior laws extends through 2006. These PAYGO rules, which were adopted as part of the 1990 bipartisan budget agreement, have been crucial to the progress that we made during the 1990s to go from record budget deficits to budget surpluses, surpluses that let us retire $400 billion in the national debt. With the help of PAYGO and statutory limits on discretionary spending, we were able to improve the bottom line of the budget for 8 consecutive years, culminating in surpluses for fiscal years 1998 through 2000. Unfortunately, the 10-year, $5.6 trillion surplus that was projected less than 2 years ago has almost disappeared, and the budget has fallen back into annual deficit. Now more than ever, it is essential that we reaffirm our commitment to the budget tools that can help us restore budget discipline and return the Federal Government to a balanced budget. That is why I am disappointed that the Republican leadership has decided to bring to the floor legislation that would eliminate PAYGO sequestration for all future years to which the law applies. Mr. Speaker, no one wants across-the-board cuts to Medicare or veterans' education or child support enforcement or other domestic priorities; and contrary to the assertion of the chairman of the Committee on the Budget, the motion to recommit would do no such thing. The Republican solution, that we ignore the long-term budget deficits facing our Nation, will not make them go away. We should not ignore our budget problems; we should work to solve them. The Spratt motion to recommit would avoid domestic spending cuts by clearing the PAYGO scorecard for 2002 and 2003. But unlike H.R. 5708, the Spratt motion would require the President to submit a budget that achieves balance within 5 years, excluding the Social Security trust fund surplus, before clearing the PAYGO scorecard for fiscal years 2004 through 2006. The motion to recommit would, therefore, hold Republicans and the President to their professed goal of achieving fiscal balance and protecting Social Security revenues in the process. To avoid future across-the-board cuts, the President would have to reverse course and move the budget back into surplus. Mr. Speaker, for several months we have been urging the President to hold bipartisan budget negotiations to chart a path back to fiscal control. It is well past time for the President to present Congress with a budget that acknowledges the new fiscal realities confronting our Nation. I urge my colleagues to vote for the motion to recommit and to take the first steps toward restoring fiscal discipline to the Federal budget.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, some of our friends today, in debate, have suggested that somehow adoption of the Spratt resolution would yield American sovereignty to the U.N. or, as one speaker put it, would subordinate foreign policy to the Security Council. Is it not true that under the Spratt resolution the decision of the United States to back up U.N. inspections, to back up U.N. enforcement actions, would be ours to make and that, moreover, those troops would remain under U.S. command? Is there any ground for treating this as some kind of abdication of sovereignty?

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me time. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of the conference report on the Help America Vote Act. I want to congratulate the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ney), the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Conyers), and others who have relentlessly pursued this historic bipartisan agreement. Mr. Speaker, the problems that Florida experienced at the polling places and its primaries again this year demonstrate that our last national election was not just a once-in-a-life-time phenomenon. The problems that plagued us 2 years ago will continue to occur if we do not take action to address them. This legislation takes that action. It requires States to meet minimum Federal election standards. It authorizes funds to help implement those standards and to educate voters, improve equipment, train poll workers and improve access for disabled voters. It also incorporates key elements of legislation I helped author, the Voting Improvement Act, H.R. 775, to buy out unreliable and outdated punch card machines, the type of equipment that has the highest error rate. Mr. Speaker, now more than ever we need to make sure that every American can participate fully in our democratic form of government. We must ensure that every vote is counted. I urge my colleagues to take a significant step towards achieving these goals by joining me in support of the conference report, H.R. 3295.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of the substitute resolution offered by the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) and in opposition to the Hastert-Gephardt resolution. The Spratt-Allen-Price-Snyder-Clyburn - Matsui - Larson - Moran - Reyes -Levin resolution recognizes the danger posed by Iraq's possession and development of weapons of mass destruction, and it recognizes the need to enforce United Nations resolutions providing for the destruction of these weapons and of the capacity to produce them. It authorizes the President to utilize armed forces to protect and support arms inspectors and to undertake enforcement actions under U.N. auspices. It does not, however, give the President open-ended authorization to use force unilaterally or preemptively. For that he would have to come to Congress for a specific vote after other means had been exhausted. As the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) has testified, ``A second vote is not an imposition on the President's powers. It is the age-old system of checks and balances and one way Congress can say that we prefer for any action against Iraq to have the sanction of the Security Council and the support of a broadbased coalition.'' An up-or-down congressional vote on a resolution authorizing force is a blunt instrument at best. And regardless of which resolution passes, the President and Congress and the country will still face critical decisions down the road. The Iraqi threat, as grave as it is, must be assessed in the context of other antiterrorist and diplomatic objectives. After all, the war against al Qaeda is hardly won. It is critical, as the Spratt resolution states, that action against Iraq not imperil international cooperation in the fight against terrorism or displace related diplomatic endeavors such as pursuit of an Israeli- Palestinian settlement. Moreover, a complex of policies is either already in place or is envisioned in the resolutions before us: a regime of coercive inspections; U.N. enforcement of the mandate to disarm; readiness for a devastating response to any aggressive Iraqi military action; no-fly zones; intense surveillance; a tight embargo on strategic and dual-use materials. Could these policies contain, deter, and ultimately disarm Iraq, making a military invasion unnecessary and enabling us to attend to other equally important antiterrorist priorities? We cannot answer that question now. But should we not know that answer before we authorize a massive military invasion which surely represents an extreme option? We should not make this congressional vote any blunter an instrument than it needs to be. We are being asked to line up behind an open-ended resolution that has been improved by hortatory language but still authorizes the President to invade unilaterally or preemptively under circumstances, weeks or months hence, that we cannot possibly foresee. This, we are told, will help the administration influence the U.N. Security Council and apply maximum pressure on Iraq. Now, that is not a negligible argument; but it does not do justice to our duty, as members of a coordinate branch of government, to help set national policy. Our job is to provide a responsible and rational guide to policy, should compliance and enforcement fail. The open-ended resolution requested by the President would represent an abdication of that responsibility. The Spratt resolution with its required second vote would give us the means to exercise our constitutional role more fully and with better command of the facts. And, no less than the Hastert-Gephardt resolution, it would serve notice now of our resolve to see United Nations resolutions upheld and Iraq disarmed. Our concern about granting open-ended authority to make war should be heightened as we consider the administration's recently enunciated ``doctrine'' of the right of one country to take preemptive or even preventative military action against hostile states. This doctrine goes far beyond the recognized right of anticipatory self-defense. A unilateral attack on Iraq would be difficult to justify under existing standards, for even the Bush administration has not consistently argued that the threat to the U.S. from Iraq is imminent. But we must ask how this new doctrine would play out as other nations eagerly adopt it and act on it for their own purposes. As former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger recently stated, ``It cannot be either in the American national interest or in the world's interest to develop principles that grant every nation an unfettered right of preemption against its own definition of threats to its security.'' Mr. Speaker, the question before us is not whether but how best to address the threats posed by Iraq's weapons programs and its continued defiance of the world community. A purely military response, particularly one taken unilaterally or preemptively, would have costs and risks that should lead us to regard it as a last resort. We must deal with the threat in ways that do not compromise our broader war on terrorism and that maintain the support and engagement of our allies. The Spratt substitute resolution keeps these priorities straight. It upholds Congress' role in authorizing military operations, not indiscriminately, but under specific conditions for specific purposes. It is vastly preferable to the open-ended Hastert-Gephardt resolution, and I urge its adoption.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) would yield, the gentleman may remember that a little over a year ago, the Secretary of the Treasury was expressing concern that the Nation was going to pay down the public debt too quickly. Is that a problem that we now need to worry about?

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. That is the chart I am talking about. I appreciate the gentleman's pointing this out. Our Republican friends last week, when we were discussing this as the new fiscal year approached, they said it is not unusual to pass continuing resolutions. We pass continuing resolutions all time. It is certainly unusual to have the entire Federal budget come crashing down and to have the entire government running on continuing resolutions for months and months into the new fiscal year, and that is exactly what we are facing today. The Republicans in July, Republican Conservative Action Team, the group of the most conservative House Republicans, threatened to bring the Interior appropriations bill down, and they said that the price of their cooperation would be that the Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill would be considered next, and nothing would be done on appropriations until that bill was dealt with. And I wondered, and I expect all of us wondered during the month of August when we were home, how are Republican leaders, in fact, going to pass that Labor-HHS- Education appropriations bill within the President's totally inadequate numbers? How would we get past this bill to the rest of the appropriations agenda before the new fiscal year began? But I must say it did not occur to me, never did it cross my mind, that Republican leaders would simply disregard the start of the fiscal year and let the entire budget come crashing down all to appease the most right-wing members of their caucus. The President and his OMB Director are apparently complicit in this strategy. Actually it is an absence of strategy. It is just a dereliction of duty, irresponsibility on a monumental scale. So what I never dreamed would happen has happened indeed, and the continuing resolution that we voted on last week did not just cover one bill or two, it covered the entire discretionary budget. So the gentleman is correct. We passed in the House five appropriations bills, and that is a modern record, but the number of appropriations bills that have been sent to the President is exactly zero, and that, of course, is an institutional breakdown that does not just mean that this institution has failed to do its duty. It has real consequences for the people we represent.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I thank him for this enlightening presentation of just how serious our budget difficulties are and how we got here. As the gentleman realizes, the consequences are evident not just in these overall budget numbers, but in the dilemma we currently face with respect to getting the Nation's business done by the start of the fiscal year and passing our appropriations bills on schedule. If someone could prepare chart 18, I believe that would give us an indication of how our situation this year compares with past years. Since President Bush took office in 2001, our Republican friends have held out the promise that we could have it all, that oversized Republican tax cuts would not require tapping Social Security and Medicare surpluses, and it would not require underfunding key priorities such as education and health care. Unfortunately, however, we cannot have it all, and it is not just because of the war on terrorism, although that has had an impact on the budget, but the cushion was not there to withstand that change in the budget or the impact of Medicare and Medicaid costs. The fact is that that cushion has never been present, and now we are in a situation where our Republican friends simply cannot get their business done. They cannot pass the appropriations bills necessary to take us into the next fiscal year.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. This, of course, also means that we are paying interest, far more interest in servicing that publicly held debt than was anticipated last year.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. The money that we pay in this interest on the debt, money down the rat hole, one might say, each year over $200 billion. I wonder if there is anyone in this Chamber who could not think of better public and private uses for those funds than simply paying interest on the debt. And as we look forward to the retirement of the baby boomers and the reversal of the cash flow in Social Security, is it not true that to prepare, to prepare to start redeeming those bonds that the Social Security Trust Fund is holding and making good on those obligations, is there any better way we could prepare for that than to pay down the publicly held debt and get rid of this $200 billion burden around our necks every year in interest payments?