Rep. John J. Duncan, Jr. speaks about government spending on the House Floor on June 16, 2009.
"Mr. Speaker, we have now spent approximately $200 billion, $200 billion, on the war in Afghanistan against a foe that has almost no money and equipment, especially in comparison to ours. Now we are about to take up a supplemental appropriations bill later today to provide many billions more, all this in a place where even General Petraeus said we should remember has been known as the ``graveyard of empires.'' This comes on top of approximately $800 billion on the war in Iraq and hundreds of billions more in indirect costs for these two wars. Then, in the supplemental bill that we'll take up later today, we have $5 billion for the International Monetary Fund, and in this bill, there is a guarantee for $100 billion in loans made by the IMF, loans being made to other countries. All this money will have to be borrowed because we are so many trillions in debt already that it is not even humanly comprehensible. The bill also contains $7.7 billion for swine flu vaccines. I heard a reporting of a speech of our colleague, the gentleman from Texas, Dr. Paul, made recently, in which he said during his first stay in the House, in I think it was 1976, that there was another swine flu scare, and that only he and one other person, probably the only other medical doctor in the House at that time, voted against the money for the swine flu scare. And one person died from swine flu that year, and many more died from taking the vaccine than died from the flu. This is a great overreaction in this area as well. Many thousands are dying from other diseases that we're not paying attention to. This supplemental appropriations bill started out at $85 billion, then it went to $91 billion, then $95 billion, and now, today, $106 billion. And I ask you, are there no fiscal conservatives around here? We read last year that the Pentagon had $295 billion in cost overruns on just their 72 largest weapons systems. Now, that didn't count all the cost overruns that they might have had in all their thousands of other large-, medium-, and small-sized contracts, and we're having a hearing right today--in fact, it's going on right now, I was there earlier--in the Oversight and Government Reform Committee in which they said 74 percent of the private contracts that the Federal Government gives out are given out by the Pentagon. Are there no fiscal conservatives at the Pentagon? I know everybody is trying to prove how patriotic they are today, and everybody feels that we shouldn't question anything the Defense Department wants. But to allow $295 billion in cost overruns on just these 72 largest weapons systems, in my opinion, it's unpatriotic not to question that. And I ask again, are there no fiscal conservatives at the Pentagon? The fact is, we've turned the Defense Department primarily into the ``Department of Foreign Aid'' now, and I believe very strongly in national defense. But we cannot afford to run the whole world, and we cannot afford to have the Department of Defense be the ``Department of Foreign Aid.'' All of this comes not long after we have raised our national debt limit to over $13 trillion. Nobody can comprehend a figure like that, no one. That is an astounding figure. And yet on top of this debt that we already have, the President's budget in this year and the next 2 years will add over $4 trillion of debt to that debt, $4 trillion in this year and the next two; three years' time, $4 trillion added to our national debt. And then this year, if I had told people 2 or 3 years ago that we would have a budget this year of $3.6 trillion and that half of that, $1.87 trillion, would be deficit, nobody would have believed that. They would have thought that I was ridiculous or that I was crazy in saying that. I used to say to my colleagues that it was terrible what we were doing to our children and grandchildren. Now, I'm saying it's terrible what we're doing to ourselves because it's not going to be 5 or 10 years, if that long, before we're not able to pay all of our Social Security and veterans' pensions and all of the things that we have promised our own people. We've got to stop trying to run the whole world. It's not isolationist to say that because I believe in trade and tourism, and cultural and educational exchanges, and I believe we should help during humanitarian crises. But we can't keep spending hundreds of billions of dollars in other countries, whether it's done by the Defense Department--and of course, it's also being done by every other department and agency in the entire Federal Government."
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USA Next Ireland?by RepJohnDuncan433 views
IMF loans are a giant waste of money , and as history has proven it doesn't work, you are exactly right we don't need to be running the world but the way the privatized company's are working now has me believe that are countries leaders are not looking out for the people or the people of the future but there own hidden agenda, all the countries that have taken an IMF loan have a resource or resources that have been proven to sell in America and other capitalist countries like OIL!
myip890 2 years ago