Bobby Scott

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Edwards) for his comments and remind people that the 1964 Civil Rights legislation that prohibited discrimination included an exception, as the gentleman from Ohio has indicated, for religious organizations using their own money for religious purposes. No one anticipated at that time that one would take Federal money and try to discriminate in employment based on religion. Let us be clear. If you can discriminate based on religion and what church or religious organization you belong to, you can essentially discriminate based on race. Now, the question before us is whether or not, in a government-funded program, you can declare that you do not want to hire people of certain religions. Now, the problem that occurs is that if you can discriminate with Federal money, well, why can you not discriminate with your own money? If you have a group of people running a manufacturing firm and they are all of the same religion, why should they have to hire somebody of a different religion? Because it is against the law. Because we have such a sorry history of discrimination in our country that we just decided that we were not going to allow discrimination based on religion; that it is so ugly that we are going to prohibit it by law, and we did. You cannot hire people with Federal money, you cannot hire people with your own money and discriminate against them solely because of their race, color, creed, national origin, or sex. That is the law. Now, we can change the law. You can start allowing discrimination. You can have somebody come around and say, Well, we are running a manufacturing firm and we do not want to work with people of a different religion; or, We do not want to work with people of a different race. We can change the law. That is our prerogative, and that is what we are doing with this bill if we pass it in its present form. We will be saying to the public that we hire everybody but Catholics or Jews. That is about as ugly a situation as there is. I do not know how you can dress that up and have it come out anything other than ugly. I mean you can put lipstick on a pig, but you cannot pass it off as a beauty queen, and you cannot say, We do not hire Catholics and Jews, and try to pass that off as anything but ugly discrimination.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Speaker, just so we know what we are talking about, I would like to know whether or not if the bill passes in its present form, you can take Federal money and have a policy of not hiring Catholics and Jews; if it passes in its present form with the Federal money. Now, the church can do what it wants with the church money. That exemption is not affected. But under this bill in its present form, can you have the policy of telling people that you are the best qualified, but we do not hire Catholics and Jews?

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I think we need to remember what we are voting on. This amendment includes all of the provisions of the Community Services Block Grant, for which there is strong bipartisan support. It includes two improvements on the bill. One I do not believe is that controversial, but you never can tell. It just says you cannot run a worship service on the government dime. That is, if you are contracted to provide a government service, you cannot have a worship service in the middle of the government program. If you want to have worship, it has to be separate and apart from the government service, so people getting the government services can get the full benefit of the program without having to be subjected to proselytization or religious instruction. That part, I do not think, is controversial; but you never can tell. The other part, of course, is the discrimination provision. We have had trouble in the past trying to get down exactly what we are voting on in this, but I think we have come to the time where everybody acknowledges what is going on. In 1941, President Roosevelt signed an executive order prohibiting discrimination in any defense contract. In 1965, President Johnson signed an executive order, no discrimination in any Federal contract. That has been the law of the land since that time. If you want a contract with the government to run a program, you cannot discriminate based on religion. Now, that does not require you to change your mission or anything. It is just if you are using Federal money, you cannot discriminate. Now, if you cannot get along with people of other religions, whose problem is it? Traditionally, that is your problem. If you cannot get along with people of different religions, that is your problem; that is not their problem. And if you are trying to get a government contract and just for one reason or another do not want to hire people of other religions, that is your problem; and you have been ineligible to run a government program, personally, faith-based, or otherwise. According to this, if you cannot get along with people of other religions, it is their problem. The victim is the one that gets hurt in this situation. The minority religions, the ones you want to discriminate against, are the ones that get hurt. That is a change in the law. Now, remember the present law under title VII, you cannot discriminate against people with your own money. You cannot take money out of your pocket and start hiring people and say on this construction project, I am only hiring people that belong to this church; you belong to another church. Although you are the best carpenter that applied, you are not going to get the job, solely because of your religion. You cannot do that with your own money. Why should you be able to do it with Federal money? Now, we have heard this thing about the pro-choice groups do not have to hire people that are right-to-life. We have a concept in law called a protected class. There are certain groups of Americans that historically have been discriminated against so badly that we have had to pass laws to prohibit it, have a protected class. Our history on racial discrimination and religious discrimination is so ugly that we made it illegal to discriminate. So there is a difference between the NRA not hiring people because of their position on gun control and the NRA saying we are not going to hire Catholics and Jews, or we are not going to hire blacks. That is different, because race and religion are protected classes. Now, these are not gifts to the church. They are contracts to provide government services. If you cannot provide government services the way everybody has been providing them since 1941, the question is, whose problem is it? I believe it is your problem. If you cannot get along with other people and do not want to hire people because of their religion, that is your problem; you are ineligible for government contracting. This bill in its present form would change that. If you cannot get along with other people, that is their problem, not your problem. We ought to go back to the traditional way, since 1965 on all contracts and since 1941 on defense contracts, that if you cannot hire people, regardless of their religion, then you are not entitled to contract with the Federal Government to provide those services. We need to adopt the Woolsey amendment. It validates the Community Services Block Grant program. It says that you cannot have discrimination in employment and you cannot run worship services on the government dime. That is the way it ought to be, and that is the way I hope it is if this substitute is adopted.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Chairman, this is slightly different from the language in the substitute. It requires religious organizations to separate any religious activities from CSBG activities to ensure that such programs meet current constitutional standards. Several speakers from the other side have mentioned that you should not be able to proselytize during a government-funded program, and that is consistent with this amendment. The language tracks language that was recommended by the Bush administration's Justice Department during the 107th Congress' consideration of President Bush's faith-based legislation in H.R. 7. It also tracks the H.R. 7 language that was reported by the House Committee on the Judiciary and passed by the full House. In his testimony to Congress, the Bush administration Department of Justice argued, ``Justice O'Connor requires that no government funds be diverted to `religious indoctrination,' thus religious organizations receiving direct funding will have to separate their social service programs from their sectarian practices.'' The current provisions in CSBG do not meet the current constitutional standard required. Specifically, the current provision provides that only ``no funds provided directly to a religious organization shall be expended for sectarian worship, instruction or proselytization.'' This language fails to address whether religious organizations can include a religious message in publicly funded services and also fails to answer the question of whether volunteers can be used. Mr. Chairman, if we do not pass this amendment, we are essentially creating a system where the Federal Government officials will have to pick and choose which religious organization will get the benefit of using publicly funded programs to advance their religious views. Such a policy violates the Constitution and violates their religious liberty to believe their own religion and not be subjected to the views of others as a condition of receiving government-funded services. In addition to failing to adopt these safeguards, it raises a concern as to how we measure the success of a faith-based program. The administration has said that faith-based institutions are better and more successful, but common sense will tell us that some faith-based programs are better than secular programs, but some secular programs are better than faith-based programs. To that end, on what basis are we measuring the success of a program if it incorporates religion? Are we weighing the Baptist approach to drug treatment against the Muslim approach? This amendment answers the simple question, Can you conduct a worship service in the middle of a federally funded program with volunteers or not? This amendment simply answers ``no.'' If you want to conduct a worship service, those activities must be voluntary and separate from the government-funded program. On the other hand, the House can reject this amendment and require some program participants to participate in sectarian worship services as part of the government-funded program. I hope we adopt the position taken by the Committee on the Judiciary in H.R. 7 and agree to the amendment.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent that the first vote be the Woolsey vote and then my votes after that, because if the Woolsey amendment is adopted, my votes will not be necessary.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Chairman, this amendment is simple. It is the specific, straight up-and-down vote on the discrimination amendment without ducking and dodging. It asks the question whether you can take the Federal money and discriminate or not, either you can have a policy of hiring no Catholics and Jews or not or hiring just people that belong to a church that happens to be all black or all white or not. We know that if we can discriminate based on religion, we can discriminate based on race. We know also, Mr. Chairman, these are not gifts. They are contracts to perform government services. In 1941, President Roosevelt signed an executive order, no discrimination in defense contracts. In 1965, Johnson expanded that to all contracts. That has been a good policy; and if you cannot work with others, it is your problem. It is not their problem. Since 1965, that has been the law of the hand. Under the bill, it is the problem of the person being discriminated against. Now we hear talk about rights. This is the first time I have heard about the right of someone to discriminate. We usually talk about the right of someone to apply for a job and be free from discrimination based on employment, but now we have to focus on the right to discriminate. That is wrong to tell somebody that they are the best qualified, that someone is the best qualified for a federally funded job, but we do not hire people of your religion. It is wrong to tell someone if the faith-based organization has won a new contract, it is wrong to tell the group of employees on the job that we will hire everybody except people of a certain religion. That is wrong. It is either right or wrong to discriminate, Mr. Chairman. I hope my colleagues will say it is wrong by adopting this amendment.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Chairman, reclaiming my time, so that someone who owes $2 million in debt can pay $10,000 and can never pay it will be in economic slavery because every dime they make over food and rent will go into the fund to help pay the $10,000.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. They can pay $10,000 on a $2 million debt. The fact is they can never pay off the debt. They will be denied relief under the bill. Is that right?

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the bill in its present form. Instead of passing the bipartisan bill to help family farmers, we have substituted a controversial bill that violates traditional bankruptcy principles. For centuries, American bankruptcy laws had the principle that if people get over their heads in debt, they can cash in all of their assets, pay off all the debts they can, and then get a fresh start. For policy reasons, a few assets have historically been exempted and a few debts have historically been nondischargeable, especially those that have been incurred by fraud, a result of crime, or through abuse of the bankruptcy system. Yet the principle has always been the same: cash in all you have and get a fresh start. This bill violates the basic principle. People who incurred debts because of illness, unemployment, business failure and have debts they can never pay off will be denied an opportunity to get a fresh start. They will be stripped of every penny of income after basic expenses of food and rent without reasonable allowance for unforeseen emergencies such as automobile repairs, which will inevitably come up. People in these circumstances will be in economic slavery for 5 years and will probably be worse off at the end of 5 years than they were before. The bill has no rational measure of determining a person's ability to pay off debts. If someone can pay off $10,000 in his debts over 5 years, that is $167 a month, then he is not entitled to a discharge. A person could cosign a spouse's business loan only to have the spouse die or disappear. If that person has a $50,000 salary, he may find himself owing $1 million, never even able to make interest payments, and that person would be denied relief under this bill. A person with hospital bills could have hospital bills of hundreds of thousands of dollars. That person will be denied relief under this bill. This will cause many Americans who have unforeseen business failures, health problems, or unemployment to find themselves unable to pay their debts and be trapped with no way out. And for 5 years that person would have nothing to lose. Mr. Chairman, if our goal is to create a situation where people are stressed out with nothing to lose and to maximize the chances that a person would totally lose control and terrorize a community or its coworkers, this is it. Last year in Washington, D.C., we saw the impact of financial distress. A North Carolina farmer drove his tractor into the pond near the National Mall and was quoted as saying, ``I am broke. I am busted. I am out.'' No one in the community is safe when we have increased the number of neighbors who feel like they have nothing to lose. Finally, Mr. Chairman, we have to consider the impact the bill will have on small business entrepreneurs. How many people will be willing to take a chance on a new business if any failure will result not just in bankruptcy but no relief for the family for 5 years? No bank in the future will lend a business any cash, especially one in financial distress that actually needs the money without the personal signature of the owner. And so who will risk not only loss of everything but also risk family poverty with no relief for 5 years if the business fails? Long ago we decided that there would be no debtors prisons in America. This bill represents an effort to take a giant step backwards towards that bygone era. So I urge my colleagues to reject this bill in its present form so that we can return to the original bill and help family farmers.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Chairman, if the gentleman will yield, so every dime that they make over food and rent goes into the fund to help pay the $10,000. If that is all they can pay, they have to pay that so they are down to food and rent for 5 years although they can only pay $10,000 on a $2 million debt. They cannot get relief from the $2 million under this bill. And the gentleman agrees with that.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Chairman, I said that somebody who can pay off $10,000 but can never pay off the $2 million, are they denied relief under this bill?

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. If the gentleman would yield, I said that people who have $2 million in debt that could pay $10,000 of that debt that they obviously can never pay will not be able to get relief under this bill. Is that true?

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Chairman, if the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Cannon) suggested that what I said was not accurate, I ask what did I say that was not accurate?

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. And Maryland is suffering from the same budget crunch that Virginia is suffering from, all the States, virtually all the States are suffering from, where we are cutting back on services, cutting back on transportation, cutting back on health care, knocking people off of Medicaid. We are trying to provide more health care, and we are knocking people off. We are not creating jobs. We did not extend the unemployment benefits for those who are in areas of extremely high unemployment. Tuition has gone up. Your property taxes have gone up. Education funding, we are underfunding No Child Left Behind by $9 billion. And so the money that the States expected to get from No Child Left Behind they are not getting. The State House of Delegates in Virginia voted 98 to one to reject the No Child Left Behind because they found that the unfunded mandates were not offset by the money that was supposed to come. Now, we knew when we passed that there were complicated mandates, expensive mandates in that bill, but the authorized spending would more than compensate for those mandates. Unfortunately, we did not send the money that we promised. We sent the mandates, did not send the money. And so when you add up all those, would people rather have had decent public school education, would they rather have had decent health care, better roads, lower tuition? You add all those up, the little tax cut, and when you add it up, and unless we have a profound new direction, we will not be able to pay Social Security. You ask people whether they would rather have Social Security after 2017 or the $300 tax cut today, I think most people would say let us take care of Social Security first. And if I can get a tax cut, I would like one; but let us take care of Social Security first. We did not do that. We took care of tax cuts first. And we are going to look at that Social Security chart, and who knows what we will be able to do in 2020 and 2025. Now, a lot of people pushed the ideas of personal responsibility. And the suggestion is that if there is no Social Security, your retirement will be your personal responsibility and we will not have Social Security. Like, what is the problem if you lose Social Security? You know, I got mine, I got investments. Is that the attitude? Or should we adopt the philosophy that we have had since Franklin Roosevelt was President that senior citizens ought to be able to retire with some dignity. And whatever happens to their investments, whatever happens to the stock market, you ought to be able to have at least a minimum amount of money coming in for necessities, rent and food. And if all else goes badly, you ought to be able to have that. And we are in a situation now where unless there is a profound change in direction, we will not be able to pay Social Security after it stops running a surplus. As a matter of fact, in this budget we have now, it is a 10-year budget, goes to 2014, we have, they say, it goes in the balance, but that includes a $275 billion Social Security surplus. Just in 3 years in 2017, it goes from $275 billion surplus to no surplus. We just had in 3 years a $275 billion hole in the budget. What provisions have been made for that? None. None. We will worry about it. And the challenge, quite frankly, I would say to my good friend, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cummings), the challenge is getting someone to acknowledge that there is a problem. We had a Committee on the Budget meeting yesterday. We heard that when you look at this chart the economy was good. Good? We heard that the budget deficit was manageable. You cannot get anyone to acknowledge that there is a problem. If we do not have a profound change in direction, we cannot pay Social Security. We cannot get anyone on the other side of the aisle to acknowledge that that constitutes a problem. If one does not acknowledge that there is a problem, one is certainly not going to come up with a painful solution. That is the problem that we have, this problem we have in this Congress today that making the tough choices is painful. We made the tough choices in 1993 and suffered in the next campaign. Republicans picked up 50 seats with the budget vote, that responsible budget vote, as a primary issue in the campaign. And so we suffered because of that. But it was the right thing to do. I do not think anybody that voted for that budget, even those that lost their seats as a direct result of that vote, I do not think they think it was the wrong thing to do. When the 218th vote was cast, the Republicans started chanting bye-bye Marjorie. She had cast the 218th vote that passed the bill. And they waved bye-bye Marjorie and defeated her in the next election using that vote.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. To show how this deficit also looks, let us look at another way of looking at it, and that is, of the budget, how much of today's budget is paid for with borrowed money? When President Clinton ran up a surplus, obviously we were not borrowing any money to pay for the operation of government. But when this administration came in, we started borrowing money, and in fact this year almost one-third, and with the new numbers, more than one- third of the on-budget spending is paid for with borrowed money. You borrow it from Medicare and Social Security, and then you borrow the rest, and over one-third is paid for with borrowed money. You can see, we have not done that since World War II. We are in a peacetime economy, and we are borrowing a higher percentage of the Federal budget. The spending we have in the Federal budget, a higher percentage is paid for with borrowed money than at any time since World War II. This is irresponsible. Now, how did we get in that mess? Well, we had tax cuts. Who got the tax cuts? I remember one candidate during the campaign, President Bush, said the vast majority of his tax cuts will go to those at the bottom. Let us see what that looks like on a chart. The bottom 20 percent, the next 20 percent, the middle 20 percent, this is about what they got, the percentage of the tax cut they got. Then the fourth 20 percent. The upper 20 percent got 70 to 80 percent of the tax cut. In fact, the top 1 percent got more than half of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. The top 1 percent got more than half. Now, just in case people want to know what they got out of it, because people say, you got a lot, you got a little, in terms of those who made over $1 million, that is what you got. If you made only $500,000 to $1 million, that is what you got. If you made $200,000 to $500,000, or $100,000 to 200,000, or $75,000 to $100,000. As you get to what most people actually make on average, all of them, some pay a little more tax, depending on the number of children and deductions and whatnot, but $40,000 to $50,000, you hardly need any ink to draw the bar. Millionaires, off the chart. That is who got the tax cut. When you run up all this deficit, you have debt; and debt is somewhat esoteric, but interest on the national debt is cash money. You have got to pay it. Now, this black line is the interest on the national debt which we would have paid if we had not messed up the budget in 2001 with all these tax cuts. Under the Clinton Administration, when they left office, the projections at that time, before we messed up the budget in 2001, we would have paid off the entire national debt held by the public around 2008 to 2009. We were scheduled to pay zero interest on the national debt. Instead, we offered those people the big tax cuts, ran up the debt, increased the debt and increased the interest on the national debt, so by 2008, 2009, 2010 we are going to be spending $300 billion on interest on the national debt rather than zero, because we ran up the debt, we were fiscally irresponsible. Now, again remember, less than $800 billion, everybody's individual income tax; the first $300 billion, gone, interest on the national debt that we would not have had to pay. We were told that we needed to get into that mess, run up the debt, run up the interest on the national debt, to create jobs. Let us see how we did. This is the number of jobs created every 4 years since Harry Truman was in office. Harry Truman created jobs. Eisenhower created more jobs than we had when he came in; this is about 4 million. Kennedy, Johnson, Johnson, second administration, about 6 million. Nixon and Ford, everybody creating jobs. Clinton, almost 10 million first term, another 10 million the second term. From 40 yards away, with bad vision, you can tell who is the worst since the Truman administration. Now, every time something goes wrong, it is always 9/11. Three million jobs lost since the President came in office. 9/11 could not possibly be the cause of this any more than the Korean War stopped Truman from creating jobs. The Vietnam War did not stop Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon from creating jobs. The hostage situation in Iran did not stop Carter from creating jobs. The Cold War was going on all this time, Reagan, Bush. Clinton had Somalia, Grenada. Everybody is still creating jobs until you get here. One of the problems, however, as you get into this situation, is Social Security. This is the cash flow for the Social Security trust fund. These purple lines represent the surplus we talked about that is bringing more money into Social Security than we are spending today. That will go on until about 2017. Then we start going into deficit. This line at about 2022, 2025, that is $300 billion. That is about $1,000 for every man, woman and child in America. For a family of four, $4,000. Every man, woman and child, $1,000. When you get around 2032, you are up to $600 billion, or $2,000 for every man, woman and child. By 2037, a $1 trillion a year shortfall. I admit if you look at this, you may conclude that there is nothing we could have done about that. $800 billion for individual income tax, you would have to spend all of that just to maintain Social Security by 2037. So maybe it was a lost cause. Maybe Social Security was a good idea, but it could never work. Until you look back. You remember this chart where the top 1 percent got half the tax cut? The 2001, not 2003, just the 2001 tax cut, if you took the money that the top 1 percent got in the 2001 tax cut, and instead of giving a tax cut to the upper 1 percent, put that same amount of money into the Social Security trust fund, you would have run up the surplus to a point where you could have paid Social Security benefits without reducing benefits for 75 years. Or you can give the top 1 percent a tax cut and worry about this $1 trillion deficit when you get to it. We made the choice. Excuse me, they made the choice, because the gentleman and I opposed the tax cuts and would have preferred making Social Security secure for the future, would have preferred paying off the national debt so we would not have had $300 billion a year to deal with in just a couple of years. We had other priorities: health care, Social Security, veterans benefits that this House voted to cut by $19 billion last year. We had other priorities. But we could have solved this with just what the top 1 percent got in the 2001 tax cut. They could have gotten all they got in the 2003 tax cut, just the 2001. So when we look at this chart, you cannot create a chart like this by accident. You cannot have every single year under the Clinton administration, without exception, being better than the last, and every year in the Bush administration being worse than the last. Let me tell you a little bit about this up-tick. Things will continue to get worse. But by 2014, technically, we might be back in balance if we do not do anything. If we do not do anything; that is, if we do not change present law. The President has suggested that we make the tax cuts permanent, do not let them expire. If we are to go back into balance, we have to reject that initiative. The President has said, let us go to Mars for $1 trillion. If we want to get back into balance, we have to reject that initiative. Let us privatize Social Security, take some money out, not put more money in the trust fund, for $1 trillion, to privatize Social Security. If we expect to go back into balance, we have to reject that initiative. In other words, we have to reject all of the President's initiatives just to get back to balance. And if we do, we would have run up the debt so much in the meanwhile that we will be paying over $300 billion in interest on the national debt, rather than zero that we would have paid had we not messed up the budget. Again, anyone who voted for the red and against the green ought to start off with an explanation of their vote and an apology.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. They had to spend the Social Security and Medicare surplus before they got to the $477 billion that the gentleman mentioned as a unified deficit. Less than $800 billion in individual income tax. That includes everybody.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Speaker, I just want to comment on one of things our colleague from Washington, D.C., said about cutting spending as the answer. We had a hearing over on the Senate side a couple of days ago, and one of the witnesses suggested spending as the answer, but had to acknowledge that to get close to balancing, you would have to eliminate Federal funding for health care, Federal funding for transportation, totally eliminate Federal funding for education, and that would only get you back to balancing, not enough to pay off any of the national debt. So if you are not going to do that, you ought to be honest. Also, when you talk about job loss, everybody says, well, you know, it was not our fault, it was not our fault. The fact is, when we were fiscally responsible in the 1990s when President Clinton was vetoing the massive tax cuts, we created jobs. As soon as this budget passed, we started losing jobs. That is what happened. Now you can explain it one way or another. Finally, let me say that we do not often discuss it, but there are national security implications running up a big deficit. When we had to come up with 87 billion more dollars to continue the war in Iraq, we had to borrow the money. How much more money can you borrow? Suppose something else came up? When President Clinton left office, we had a $250 billion surplus, counting the Social Security surplus; and if we needed $87 billion, we could come up with $87 billion. Now we have to find people to borrow $87 billion from. The fact is that many national governments are now holding hundreds of billions of dollars of our debt. Some are not our traditional allies. China, suppose we got into a negotiation with China over weapons of mass destruction, over trade policy, and in the middle of the negotiations they said, We are not going to buy a $100 billion of your paper next year unless you agree with us, unless you let us produce weapons of mass destruction, unless you agree with us on the trade deal, what would we do? Because if they stopped buying the paper or, even worse, if they sold it, interest rates would go up to double digits overnight. There would be nobody to buy it. So there are national security implications in running up this kind of debt. Finally, we just have to acknowledge that balancing the budget is tough. There are no easy solutions. You cannot produce popular tax cuts and popular spending and think you can end up with a balanced budget. You have to make the tough decisions. That is what we did in 1993. They were politically unpopular, but we did the right thing. And that is what we need to get back to today; otherwise, it will get worse before it gets better and we will be spending hundreds of billions of dollars more than we need to in interest on the national debt, and we will have no way to address the Social Security shortfall that is right around the corner.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Less than $800 billion.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. It is hard to put the magnitude of this mess into perspective; $300 billion more interest on the national debt in 2008, 2009 than we should have paid. Should have been zero. $300 billion. Do you know how many people you can hire at $30,000 apiece with $300 billion? 10 million. 10 million. Just deal out $30,000 jobs. 10 million. Do you know how many people are listed as unemployed in America today? Nine million. You can hire every unemployed person in America, offer each and every one a $30,000 job, and have money left over with the additional interest on the national debt that we are going to have to pay because the budget has been messed up, and we are going to be paying $300 billion in interest on the national debt rather than zero if we had stuck to the fiscal responsibility that was exercised when President Clinton vetoed irresponsible bills.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Maryland for taking the leadership on this budget. We have a difficult situation; and rather than use adjectives and slogans, I like to use charts so we can see what is going on year by year. If we look at the budget deficit, and this is the budget without the Social Security and Medicare, which is supposed to be saved for Social Security and Medicare when we need it, this is the deficit year by year. And we see that we have got the Johnson, Nixon, Ford administrations. It dropped a little bit under Nixon-Ford. Under Carter it stayed about the same. People remember that under Reagan and Bush, the first Bush administration, deficits came about. But not enough credit is being given to what happened under the Clinton administration because without a single Republican vote in the House and without a single Republican vote in the Senate, we passed a deficit reduction plan that resulted in not only an elimination of all of that deficit but an actual surplus, a surplus without counting the Social Security and the Medicare surplus. If we count those, it is even higher than that. Some of the Republicans want to take credit for some of this. And they say in 1994 the Republicans took over Congress; so in 1995 when they were sworn in with the Republican Congress, they ought to get some credit for this. But let us remember history. When they came in, they passed massive tax cuts, primarily for the wealthy, and President Clinton vetoed those budgets. They passed them again and threatened to close down the government if he did not sign them, and he vetoed them anyway. And they closed down the government, and he vetoed them anyway. Trying to take credit for a budget plan when their plans were vetoed, even with the closure of government, their plans were vetoed; and we were able to maintain this line by vetoing their bills. They cannot get any credit for the green. However, we do see when President Bush was sworn in, they passed the same kinds of tax cuts, primarily for the wealthy, and what happened? We see what would have happened down here if President Clinton had signed it. We see exactly what would have happened. We have skyrocketing deficits. Now, this is actually not quite as low as it ought to be. This is a couple of months ago, so it is actually a little worse than this. The on-budget deficit for this year, the total deficit, the $477 billion the gentleman mentioned, does not count about $175 billion in Social Security and Medicare funds that were spent first before you went in debt another $477 billion. Almost $650 billion in total on- budget deficit, because we are supposed to be leaving Social Security and Medicare money for Social Security and Medicare. Let me put these numbers in perspective. If you add up all of the money that we receive from the individual income tax, everybody's individual income tax, the total is less than $800 billion this year. We are pushing $700 billion in on-budget deficit. It is just totally out of control. This, I think, shows it. I do not see how anybody who voted for the red can explain what is going on with the budget without starting off with an apology. And as far as we are concerned, we, the Congressional Black Caucus, voted for the green and against the red. So you cannot blame us for this.