Madam President, I rise today to talk specifically about how we get our fiscal house in order as a nation and especially as a government. Just last week, the Congress passed--or at least the Senate passed and the House passed--a proposal for a budget which, unfortunately, fails the American people dramatically in the area of controlling spending and in the area of good tax policy. It creates a cascade. It is a Democratic budget that creates a cascade of new spending, hundreds of billions of dollars of new spending which will grow the size of the Government dramatically and which is, therefore, undisciplined in its approach.
It also proposes tax policy which will radically increase taxes on working Americans and have the effect of stifling what has been an extraordinary economic expansion, which in part has been a function of having a tax policy which understands that if you let people keep their money, they tend to be more productive with those dollars, they tend to go out and take risks, be entrepreneurs, create jobs, and as a result, the Federal Government gets more revenue because people creating these jobs pay taxes and we end up with more economic activity. We have had 72 months of growth, and we have created 7.4 million new jobs in this country, and that is a significant step in the right direction toward economic expansion.
But all that is at risk because we, as a government, tend to spend more than we take in, and we do not have in place a discipline necessary as a government to effectively manage our own house. This was reflected in the budget that was just passed, regrettably. Therefore, as we also look to the future, we are confronting a cost to the Government which is going to radically increase the expenditures of the Federal Government to a point where our children and our children's children will not be able to afford them.
In fact, just the cost of three programs alone--Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid--by the year 2025, because of the retirement of the baby boom generation, will actually exceed the amount of money which the Federal Government has historically spent as a percentage of gross national product. So by about the year 2025, because of the retirement of the baby boom generation, three programs--Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid--will absorb all the money that historically the Federal Government has spent, which means there will be no money left over for education, laying out roads, or environmental protection.
We will be in a position where our children, in order to bear the burden of those three programs, will have to pay a tax rate which will make it impossible for them to afford their own Government and will make their lifestyle significantly constrained. The pressure on them will be dramatic because the burden of taxes will exceed their ability to pay them and still maintain a quality lifestyle. Their ability to send their children to college, to buy a house, to have a good lifestyle, to have the luxuries which our generation has had will be constrained by the fact that the size of the Federal Government is growing out of control as a function of the retirement of the baby boom generation.
So these two events combined--the dramatic expansion in entitlement spending and the Democratic budget which was essentially grossly irresponsible in the area of spending on the discretionary side of the account and in the area of creating debt; it will add $2.5 trillion of new debt to the Federal Government over the 5 years of this budget--these two events combined are going to put a lot of pressure on our economy and on the well-being of our Nation.
A group of us believe very strongly that we need to put in place mechanisms in this Government which more effectively discipline the spending of the Government. So I am introducing today, along with 27 colleagues--and that is a fair number of cosponsors--the Stop Over-Spending Act, SOS. This bill has eight basic elements. I am not going to go through them all, but I wish to highlight the ones that are significant.
Basically, what this bill does is it puts in place disciplines which allow this Congress, if it desires to do so--all of these disciplines can be waived by 60-vote points of order, basically--if Congress desires to do so, it can limit the growth of the Federal Government to something that is affordable to the American people.