Mr. SCHIFF. I thank the gentleman for yielding to me and for his sustained leadership in dealing with the country's fiscal situation.
Mr. Speaker, it was not so long ago, in fact it was just last year, that the administration was warning Congress of the dangers of paying down the debt too fast. We were entertaining scenarios where the Nation would have no debt, and what would the consequences of that be. These were the discussions that were going on in this very Capitol just a year ago. Well, would that these dire prophesies had come true and that we were today faced with that dangerous prospect of a Nation without debt.
In fact, we are very far from being a Nation without debt. Our debt has only increased since last year. Our deficits have only spiraled since then, because not long after those warnings of those dire predictions of a debt-free America, war and recession intervened, and now we are in a situation where this Nation faces deficits as far as the eye can see.
Some are proposing, in fact, to aggravate the deficits we have now. Some are proposing that we pass tax cuts not that are effective today or tomorrow, but that will not take effect for 10 years. We had a vote last week on one such proposal. We had a vote the week before on yet another. And at the same time we are proposing further tax cuts that will not take effect until more than a decade from now, the leadership is proposing that we increase the national debt by three-quarters of a trillion dollars.
Now, these votes do not take place on the same day. It would be very difficult, I think, to schedule a vote to cut taxes 10 years from now on the one hand and to raise the national debt on the other and have the votes back to back. That would be very difficult to justify. But, in fact, that is exactly what is taking place on the House floor.
We recently had a vote on the wartime supplemental appropriations bill. That is a measure that every Member of Congress supports. It provides necessary supplemental funding for the war effort. But buried in that bill of a couple weeks ago was a provision to allow the national debt to increase $750 billion. Now, why was that buried in that bill? It was buried there because Members did not want to have to justify or explain how it is we could be voting to extend tax cuts beyond 10 years from now when at the same time we are raising our national debt. We are, in fact, borrowing the money to provide some of these cuts.
That is not any way to run a Nation. That is not how we run our budgets at home; that is not how we ought to run our budgets here. What we have to do is recognize that the prosperity that we enjoyed in the last 10 years was contributed to by the fact that we had our budget in balance; that, in fact, we were running a surplus for the first time in many, many years, and keeping our budget in balance had the effect of keeping interest rates low, making the dream of home ownership possible for so many American families.
Have we forgotten already the benefits of having a budget that is in balance, of paying down the national debt, the confidence that that inspires in American markets, the impact it has on the lower interest rates we pay on our mortgages or on our credit card debt? That is a real tax on the American people. You are taxed every time you pay your mortgage. You are paying for the cost of borrowing money. And we are making that more expensive for you because, in effect, the Federal Government is competing with you to borrow money whenever we run a deficit, whenever we are in debt.
So the action we take in raising the national debt by $750 billion means that your mortgages are going to be more expensive, that you are going to be paying more in interest rates, that your children are going to pay more, that a prescription drug benefit may be placed out of reach because we simply do not have the resources to pay a billion dollars a day in interest and try to provide prescription drug benefits for seniors that cannot afford to pay for their medicine and pay their rent and buy their groceries at the same time.
So what do we do? The administration says we need to raise the debt limit; that we need to borrow, or we are going to default. Are we in the Blue Dogs advocating that we go into default? Of course not. No one in the House is advocating that we default on our fiscal obligations. But what we are advocating, what we are asking of the leadership of this House is to work with us on a more modest increase in the national debt and, at the same time, work with us on a plan to get this country back to a balanced budget. They have to go hand in hand.
American taxpayers would not want to increase the debt limit on a credit card without any plan for how they were going to pay off their credit card debt. That would not be a smart investment. The same is true for the Nation. Before we extend the limit of what this country can borrow, we ought to require of this Congress and this administration that we come up with a plan to balance the budget over the intermediate term and the long term, recognizing that in the face of the war on terrorism, in the face of our efforts to pull ourselves up from this economic downturn, that we may have to endure deficits in the short term. Still, in the midterm and in the long term, we must get back to putting our fiscal house in order.
And all of this begs a question, Mr. Speaker: Where have all the budget hawks gone? Where have all the advocates of a balanced budget gone? There used to be some great voices in this Chamber for balancing the budget, for paying down the debt. Many of my colleagues on this side of the aisle won their seats in the House 15 years ago and 20 years ago by campaigning against the spiraling national debt.
Where have they gone? Why have we forgotten so readily the value of the importance to our future of having a balanced budget?
So today we urge our colleagues to work with us. Let us have a modest increase in the debt in light of the present difficulties, in light of the demand for resources for the war on terrorism. Let us have a modest increase in the debt. But let us accompany that increase with a plan that gets us to a balanced budget once again. Let us not dramatically expand our national debt with no plan whatsoever. That simply is not being a good trustee for the American people. And that is the challenge ahead of us today, to work together, with this House, Democrats and Republicans, with our colleagues in the Senate, with the administration. We can do this. We can do this. We have done this before. It is not easy.
There are many things that we would like to do that are competing for the same resources, but we have to recognize that if we do work together and we do take down this national debt, pay it off, reduce our deficits, that means that the billion dollars a day that we are spending in interest we can spend one day's worth of that interest on building new schools in your neighborhoods. We can spend another day of that interest providing prescription drug benefits to seniors. We can spend another day of that interest on fixing potholes in the roads. We can spend another day of that interest in making sure that we expand health care access to children. We can give another day of that interest back to the taxpayer and help them pay their personal debts and their personal obligations. And this is just with a week's worth of interest, $7 billion that can be provided in the form of additional tax cuts or that can be provided in the form of additional services for the American people if we do not saddle ourselves with nonproductive debt, and that is the challenge.
And I want to applaud my colleagues who have worked so hard and for many years to bring about a sense of fiscal discipline in this body, to restore the commitment that we have made, both parties, to provide valuable services to the people we represent, to not encumber the future of this country and our children's future in a debt they cannot climb out from under. This is our time, this is our challenge, and I think we are up to it.