Boyle Opening Statement at Budget Committee Organizing Meeting
WASHINGTON, DC – Today, Pennsylvania Congressman Brendan F. Boyle, Ranking Member of the House Budget Committee, delivered the following opening statement at the committee's organizing meetingfor the 118th Congress:
Thank you, Jodey. And first, let me say congratulations to you, my friend. I am thrilled for you personally. I also just want to say, I'm sure we're going to have intense debates in here and differing, principled, views in terms of the role of government and diagnosing what our challenges may be and what the solutions to them may be. But we should take a moment and just reflect how fortunate each of us are to be elected as Members of Congress and to serve on the Budget Committee.
Just look around at the portraits in this room and some of the people who have been known, both in front of us and behind us, made a real contribution in American history over the course of the last four to five decades. And it says something about America that the son of a tractor salesman from West Texas can rise to become Chairman of such an important committee. So congratulations, Jodey.
Let me also say something that the Chairman and I have talked about previously — a couple things, kind of stylistically. The first is — and I'll just speak for myself — I have served on committees in which the political food fight was all over the place and it was rampant. Now, look, I don't back down from a fight— I am, after all, a Philly sports fan. But that said, when the partisanship is at an 11 on a scale of one to ten, I think it just looks ugly to the American people. I really don't think either side is winning, by the way, when that happens. And nothing actually is being achieved.
I have also served on committees, by the way — and I would cite two of them, Foreign Affairs when I first came here, and most recently with Jodey on Ways and Means — in which the Chair and Ranking Member respectively set a tone that really was followed in the committee.
I give credit — they're both no longer in Congress now — Ed Royce and Eliot Engel, when they were Chair and Ranking Member of Foreign Affairs, they set a tone of mutual respect and collegiality that absolutely influenced the culture of that committee and made it a very pleasant place to show up and do constructive work. That is my sincere goal and I believe we will be able to achieve it.
And look, we have principled disagreements. That's fine. That's the way our system was set up — in my district, by the way— by Mr. Madison and Hamilton and others of our Founders. That's legitimate. But when it engages into the nonsense, that's where a line is crossed. And I hope and believe that we will set a tone that is such that people will look at this committee in a way when we're done that perhaps is — let's just say that we can raise the bar to the highest level possible.
I also just want to say, in terms of addressing the Chair's comments on debt, I get where he's coming from. And I'm an intellectually curious person, open-minded, and I understand how the $31 trillion dollar figure can be scary to folks. That sounds like a big number. Heck, to me, one million dollars sounds like a big number.
But I also point out, there have been different points in recent American history where I heard a lot of the same rhetoric. I think back to the early 1990s. 1990, 1991, there were projections of an unsustainable deficit, an unsustainable debt — it was doom and gloom all over the place. By the late nineties, in part because of decisions that were made on a bipartisan basis by presidents of both parties and Congresses controlled by both parties, but also in large part due to remarkable economic growth.
The debate by the end of that decade was not, "oh my God, how are we going to be able to sustain this deficit?" The debate was actually whether or not the full deficit should be paid off, and what we were going to do with all these surpluses. So, let's be mindful of what Mark Twain once said, that predictions are hard to make, especially about the future.
Now, I also want to make a point about the last couple years. I personally — and I think Members on this side of the aisle — will not be shy about defending the remarkable economic record of the last two years. And something, as Americans, we should all be proud of: no country on earth has come out of the pandemic economically stronger than the United States of America.
That's not subjective — when you're looking in terms of GDP growth, record job growth, which has produced an unemployment rate at its lowest level since 1969. When you also look at it even in terms of the very difficult issue of inflation, we know that coming out of the pandemic, every country on Earth has had to deal with runaway inflation. Well it turns out, over the last six months, inflation has dropped more in the United States than all of our peer countries.
So, before I introduce my members, I would just point out this: that when you look at where the United States economy is now versus all of our peer countries, you would rather be the United States than any other country. That did not happen by accident.
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