[House Hearing, 118 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]


                   SOUNDING THE ALARM: EXAMINING THE
                      NEED FOR A FISCAL COMMISSION

=======================================================================

                                HEARING

                               BEFORE THE

                        COMMITTEE ON THE BUDGET
                        HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

                    ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEENTH CONGRESS

                             FIRST SESSION
                               __________

           HEARING HELD IN WASHINGTON, D.C., OCTOBER 19, 2023
                               __________

                            Serial No. 118-6
                               __________

           Printed for the use of the Committee on the Budget
           
           
                  [GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]           


                       Available on the Internet:
                            www.govinfo.gov
                               __________

                    U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
                    
54-144                     WASHINGTON : 2024                               


                        COMMITTEE ON THE BUDGET

                  JODEY C. ARRINGTON, Texas, Chairman
RALPH NORMAN, South Carolina         BRENDAN F. BOYLE, Pennsylvania,
TOM McCLINTOCK, California             Ranking Member
GLENN GROTHMAN, Wisconsin            BRIAN HIGGINS, New York
LLOYD SMUCKER, Pennsylvania          JANICE D. SCHAKOWSKY, Illinois
MICHAEL C. BURGESS, Texas            EARL BLUMENAUER, Oregon
EARL L. ``BUDDY'' CARTER, Georgia    DANIEL T. KILDEE, Michigan
BEN CLINE, Virginia                  SCOTT H. PETERS, California
BOB GOOD, Virginia                   BARBARA LEE, California
JACK BERGMAN, Michigan               LLOYD DOGGETT, Texas
A. DREW FERGUSON IV, Georgia         JIMMY PANETTA, California
CHIP ROY, Texas                      JENNIFER WEXTON, Virginia
BLAKE D. MOORE, Utah                 SHEILA JACKSON LEE, Texas
DAVID G. VALADAO, California         ILHAN OMAR, Minnesota,
RON ESTES, Kansas                      Vice Ranking Member
STEPHANIE I. BICE, Oklahoma          DAVID J. TRONE, Maryland
LISA C. McCLAIN, Michigan            BECCA BALINT, Vermont
MICHELLE FISCHBACH, Minnesota        ROBERT C. ``BOBBY'' SCOTT, 
RUDY YAKYM III, Indiana                  Virginia
JOSH BRECHEEN, Oklahoma              ADRIANO ESPAILLAT, New York
CHUCK EDWARDS, North Carolina

                           Professional Staff

                      Gary Andres, Staff Director
                  Greg Waring, Minority Staff Director

                            C O N T E N T S

                                                                   Page
Hearing held in Washington, D.C., October 19, 2023...............     1
    Hon. Jodey C. Arrington, Chairman, Committee on the Budget...     1
        Prepared Statement of....................................     4
    Hon. Brendan F. Boyle, Ranking Member, Committee on the 
      Budget.....................................................     7
        Prepared Statement of....................................     9
    Hon. Sheila Jackson Lee, Member, Committee on the Budget, 
      statement submitted for the record.........................    13
    Adam Brandon, President, FreedomWorks, statement submitted 
      for the record.............................................    17
    Alliance for Retired Americans, statement submitted for the 
      record.....................................................    23
    Hon. Rob Portman, Founder, The Portman Center for Policy 
      Solutions, Former U.S. Senator and Representative for Ohio, 
      Former Director of the Office of Management and Budget.....    26
        Prepared Statement of....................................    29
    Hon. Kent Conrad, Senior Fellow, Bipartisan Policy Center, 
      Former U.S. Senator for North Dakota.......................    34
        Prepared Statement of....................................    36
    Hon. Steve Womack, U.S. Representative for Arkansas District 
      3, Former Chairman of the House Committee on the Budget....    38
        Prepared Statement of....................................    40
    Hon. John Yarmuth, Former U.S. Representative for Kentucky, 
      Former Chairman of the House Committee on the Budget.......    43
        Prepared Statement of....................................    46
    Hon. Brendan Boyle, Ranking Member, Committee on the Budget, 
      submission for the record..................................    51
    Hon. Brendan Boyle, Ranking Member, Committee on the Budget, 
      submission for the record..................................    55
    Hon. Brendan Boyle, Ranking Member, Committee on the Budget, 
      submission for the record..................................    59
    Hon. Brendan Boyle, Ranking Member, Committee on the Budget, 
      submission for the record..................................    62
    Hon. Brendan Boyle, Ranking Member, Committee on the Budget, 
      submission for the record..................................    72
    Hon. Brendan Boyle, Ranking Member, Committee on the Budget, 
      submission for the record..................................    77
    Hon. Blake Moore, Member, Committee on the Budget, submission 
      for the record.............................................    84
    Hon. Rudy Yakym, Member, Committee on the Budget, submission 
      for the record.............................................   101
    Questions submitted for the record...........................   106
    Answers submitted for the record.............................   109

 
     SOUNDING THE ALARM: EXAMINING THE NEED FOR A FISCAL COMMISSION

                              ----------                              


                       THURSDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2023

                          House of Representatives,
                                   Committee on the Budget,
                                                    Washington, DC.
    The Committee met, pursuant to call, at 10:02 a.m., in Room 
210, Cannon Building, Hon. Jodey Arrington [Chairman of the 
Committee] presiding.
    Present: Representatives Arrington, McClintock, Grothman, 
Smucker, Good, Ferguson, Moore, Estes, Fischbach, Yakym, 
Brecheen, Edwards, Boyle, Higgins, Schakowsky, Blumenauer, 
Kildee, Peters, Doggett, Panetta, Jackson Lee, Trone, Scott, 
and Espaillat.
    Chairman Arrington. The hearing will come to order.
    Today's hearing will examine the need for a fiscal or debt 
commission. We will hear from a panel of experts, including 
current and former colleagues that have been through these 
battles and have lived to talk about them. In fact, it is extra 
special to have my mentor and friend, Steve Womack, who I am 
now literally serving as Chairman in the shadow of this 
beautiful portrait behind us, and so it is an honor to have you 
back here in your chamber.
    Senator Rob Portman, Ambassador Portman, is from Ohio. We 
are delighted that you are here, and he was a member of the 
bipartisan, bicameral Super Committee, established as part of 
the Budget Control Act of 2011. He also served as Director of 
OMB during the Bush Administration, which is where I got to 
know him, and he has given a lot of thought to these issues 
over the years. Ambassador, thank you for your time, and we 
welcome you here, and what is he? And an alumni of the People's 
House. That is why we have you here, because we can actually--
you are one Senator we can trust. Well, we have two, actually.
    Chairman Kent Conrad, welcome. Our friend from North Dakota 
has also worked on budget issues for a long time, obviously, 
former Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee from 2001 to 
2003, and 2007 to 2013. He is one of the principal authors of 
legislation that served as a template for the creation of the 
Simpson-Bowles Commission, and he served on the Simpson-Bowles 
Commission and worked to advance their recommendations in the 
Senate. Chairman, we are delighted that you are here with us 
today.
    Again, Chairman Womack, my dear friend from Arkansas, it 
was because of him that I served on the Joint Select Committee 
on Budget and Appropriations Process Reform. He chaired that. 
He is a cardinal on the Appropriations Committee and has served 
again as Ranking Member and Chairman of the Budget Committee 
from 2018 to 2021.
    And last but not least, our friend and fearless leader, 
once upon a time here in the Budget Committee, Chairman Yarmuth 
from the Commonwealth of Kentucky. He spent most of his time in 
Congress working on these very issues that we will be 
discussing today, but he served as Ranking Member and Chairman 
on this Committee from 2017 to 2023, was also on that Joint 
Select Committee, and thank you for your service, Mr. Yarmuth.
    I am now going to yield myself such time as I may consume, 
and I am going to try to consume just a brief period of time, 
because we are going to be pressed, I think, to leave here by 
noon for a vote on the floor. I am going to speak just off the 
cuff here.
    We have had a lot of conversations on our side, Jimmy, over 
the last few weeks as it relates to the leadership of our 
conference, and I am proud to say that we are wrestling with 
things of the greatest import which have to do with our fiscal 
health and the deterioration thereof in this country and the 
important and difficult things that we have to do to address it 
so we can right this ship and so that we can ensure that our 
children are in good financial stead and that they will not 
have to dig out of a hole of trillions upon trillions of debt. 
It is not right. It is immoral, and I don't think anybody on 
this Committee, Democrat or Republican, thinks it is 
acceptable.
    We laid out the Reverse the Curse budget resolution. It is 
our job. I think one of the problems with this place is we 
don't do our job and we don't do it very well. We don't do it 
on time, we don't take it seriously, we don't have the process 
that encourages or forces us to do this job, and so we just 
don't, we avoid these difficult conversations, and it is 
getting more difficult, so it is easier to avoid them, and by 
the way, both sides do it. We don't pay for things, we don't 
authorize before we fund things, and it is just a big ball of 
dysfunction, and it is no wonder that we are at a place where 
we are at a $2 trillion annual deficit clip that will double in 
ten years and we are at an almost $1 trillion in interest 
payment clip that will triple in ten years. It is no wonder 
with the dysfunction and the mess of this process.
    Here is one thing that I believe, I can't speak for all my 
colleagues, but we have to address mandatory spending, and 
while we are obsessing over the one-half of one-third of one 
year's discretionary budget--and I don't want to dismiss the 
fact that we ought to get our fiscal house in order--and there 
is waste and unnecessary spending on the discretionary side, 
and we ought to get after it and be stewards of the taxpayers 
up here. So it is not to diminish the discretionary, but it is 
the mandatory spending and the entitlement programs that are 
really driving the debt and that if we don't address them, we 
will truly bankrupt this country.
    Now, here is the deal. If you look at it, the unfunded 
liability, the liabilities over the next 30 years, about $120 
trillion, 99 percent of the cost, the unfunded liability, are 
two programs: Social Security and Medicare, and Social Security 
and Medicare are critically important to our seniors, and in 
this budget window, they will be insolvent, and so we have to 
address the solvency and we have to address the sustainability, 
not only for seniors today but for the future.
    So it is my strong belief that the Republican Party 
unilaterally will not be able to solve those issues, nor will 
the Democrat Party in this chamber, or in either chamber, solve 
the issues of Social Security and Medicare. They have been too 
politicized and weaponized over the years. I think we need a 
debt commission of some sort, but we have to have a commission, 
a framework, a model that works, and the reason we have you 
here is to share with us your experience and your wisdom so 
that we can apply the necessary contours to whatever debt 
commission we can pass so that in the ultimate analysis and 
outcome, we have a solution that we can hold hands together in 
a bipartisan way and move, not only move that issue forward, 
but move the country forward with some peace of mind and 
confidence that our country is on a better path.
    So that is the fundamental question as I see it. Good 
gentlemen, how do we do this, learning from all the different 
commissions, the one we served on, Steve, the 2011 Super 
Committee, the Simpson-Bowles, the Greenspan, how do we do this 
so that it works not just for this institution, but most 
importantly for the American people?
    And with that, I yield to my Ranking Member for as much 
time as he may consume.
    [The prepared statement of Chairman Arrington follows:]

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    Mr. Boyle. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    And I am just on a personal level, I am very excited to 
welcome you back, Chairman Yarmuth. Chairman Yarmuth served as 
Chairman of this Committee and in Congress with great 
distinction and also was just a wonderful friend and someone 
who really was a role model for me, and thank you, my friend, I 
would not be where I am, wherever that is, I would not be here 
without you. So it is great to have you back.
    And to Steve, one of my really good friends on the other 
side of the aisle, it is also great to have you in this 
position as well. Your approach--let me just say this, and I 
hope I don't get you in trouble--the way you approach, you are 
one of the most well-respected Members in the House, and that 
is on both sides, and at a time like this, we need it more than 
ever. So thank you for just being who you are and doing what 
you do.
    And to the two former Senators, while I haven't had the 
opportunity to work with you before, you both enjoy great 
reputations, and I know that was well earned.
    I am really interested to hear from all four of you today 
in terms of what you thought worked well on the respective 
commissions on which you served and then also ultimately what 
didn't work about them. I appreciate, and I know Jodey, my 
Chairman, is sincere in his belief that a commission is the 
answer. That is not my position. While I am attempting to keep 
an open mind about it, I am more than a little bit skeptical 
that a commission would work just frankly given the past 
history of the last dozen years. I also think that whether it 
is a commission or a straight up vote in Congress, what we are 
really avoiding is the ultimate decision.
    That is the ballgame--and not the process by which we get 
to resolve that ultimate question. Whether you take the date 
the CBO uses or the date that the Social Security Trustees use, 
either 2033 or 2034, we cross the Rubicon when it comes to 
Social Security and go over in terms of insolvency, fall below 
being able to pay 75 percent of benefits, and before that date 
we reach it on at least one of the Medicare trust funds as 
well. So we have some time, but not a lot of time.
    Ultimately though, that big question is going to be: do we 
raise revenues for Social Security and Medicare or do we cut 
benefits? I come down very clearly on the side of raising 
revenues. I don't make a secret about that and I practice what 
I preach. I am the author on the House side with Sheldon 
Whitehouse on the Senate side of a bill that would raise enough 
revenues to Social Security--and the Joint Committee on 
Taxation has verified this--that would extend the life of the 
trust fund through the year 2100.
    And I want to share just some data, remarkable poll data 
that came back. This is from Navigator, June of 2023. This poll 
asked the American people, or those polled, which approach do 
you prefer, raising taxes on the rich and large corporations, 
including closing tax loopholes, and using that extra money to 
pay our bills, or cutting programs like Social Security and 
Medicare and using that money to pay our bills? The results 
were 82 percent to seven. I have never seen polling results 
like that--82 percent opting for raising taxes on the rich and 
large corporations, seven percent cutting programs like Social 
Security and Medicare.
    So whether we talk about a commission or not a commission, 
ultimately we know that there is a choice that is going to have 
to be made, and at the end of the day, it is going to be 
Members of Congress, elected officials, who will be voting on 
what that plan looks like.
    I will say on the positive about a commission, the 2018 
commission on which you served Mr. Chair, and on which you 
served, Chairman Yarmuth, there were some specific--and we have 
already launched a bipartisan look at--budget reforms that 
could happen that would improve the process. Some of these 
passed out of a Senate Committee, but didn't ultimately become 
law. I am really interested in following up on the work that 
you guys did because I think there are some things there that 
we could turn into law and make permanently part of the 
process. So I am especially interested in hearing about 2018. 
It wasn't so much a debt commission per se, it was more about 
budget process, and I think we have a real opportunity in this 
Congress, and we have talked about this before, to make that 
law and we have support from at least three quarters of the 
respective Chairs and Ranking Members.
    But with that, welcome and welcome back, and I yield to the 
Chair.
    [The prepared statement of Ranking Member Boyle follows:]

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    Chairman Arrington. I thank my friend and Ranking Member, 
and I agree. Ultimately, we have to have the political courage 
to act and that decision and responsibility is ours. I would 
hope a commission would foster some serious conversation and 
try to depoliticize that conversation because we have to have 
it.
    Once again, in the interest of time, if any other Member or 
organization has a written statement for the record, I will 
hold the record open till the end of the day to accommodate 
those who may not have had a chance to prepare their 
statements.
    [The information follows:]

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    Chairman ARRINGTON. Once again, I would like to also 
welcome our distinguished panel and at this time we would like 
to yield five minutes to Senator Portman.

STATEMENT OF HON. ROB PORTMAN, FOUNDER, THE PORTMAN CENTER FOR 
 POLICY SOLUTIONS, FORMER U.S. SENATOR AND REPRESENTATIVE FOR 
  OHIO, FORMER DIRECTOR OF THE OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET

    Mr. Portman. Great. Thank you, Chairman Arrington and 
Ranking Member Boyle. Thanks for your thoughtful comments, both 
of you.
    Chairman, you laid out the challenge very well off the 
cuff. I appreciate your knowledge and commitment to this. Also 
appreciate you inviting Senator Conrad and me here. The last 
time I was in a hearing room with him, he was chairing it on 
Senate Budget Committee and I was on this side of the table and 
he was tough. So I am really glad to have him on this side of 
the table today.
    As you noted, I spent a lot of my career working on these 
budget issues. I was a member of the Ways and Means Committee, 
but also a member of this Committee, the Budget Committee, and 
the Budget Committee in the Senate side and the Finance 
Committee, Joint Economic Committee, and yes, I was a member of 
the so-called Super Committee. It wasn't so super to be on that 
committee, but we tried, but in these roles I have had an 
opportunity to see something, and that is the flaws of the 
current budget and appropriations process and the rules by 
which we live, which both of you talked about, and the 
inability for Congress to address the impending fiscal crisis. 
Between my service, between the House and Senate I did serve as 
Director of the Office of Management and Budget where I got to 
see the same thing on the administration side. I mean there are 
a lot of tough issues there as well and inability to address 
the fiscal crisis from an executive branch perspective.
    Why these are tough issues? A lot of political landmines 
and my experience has led me to the conclusion that it is time 
to try something different, time to try something that gives 
Congress and the American people a better tool to be able to, 
one, understand what is going on and have some trust in that, 
but also provide a balanced, bipartisan way forward. That is 
why I believe a commission with membership from Members of 
Congress as well as outside experts is necessary and timely 
right now.
    I want to commend the members of this Committee. I have 
looked at all your backgrounds. All of you have tackled this 
issue in one way or another. Everybody it seems on this 
Committee just about has offered legislation with creative 
solutions to the crisis. The Ranking Member talked about some, 
as did the Chairman, and a number of you on a bipartisan basis 
introduced legislation establishing a fiscal commission. 
Chairman Arrington included a fiscal commission in his recent 
budget resolution, which I appreciate it, but Representatives 
Huizenga and Peters, co-chair of the Bipartisan Fiscal Forum, 
have introduced the Fiscal Commission Act, which was included 
in Speaker McCarthy's most recent continuing resolution. Didn't 
pass, but it got a vote. That FCA is also co-sponsored by 
Representatives Moore and Panetta, and I apologize if I have 
missed others in the Committee who have also been similarly 
engaged, but this morning we are going to hear from your former 
Chair, Chairman Womack, who is going to have his own commission 
proposal. So I am encouraged by all that, and I want to thank 
the members of this Committee for taking a lead on that.
    You are well aware of the economic challenges and fiscal 
challenges that we face. I won't go into detail, but $33 
trillion begins to add up to a huge issue of a tremendous and 
immoral burden on future generations. It does diminish our 
standing in the world. I have certainly seen that as I have 
traveled and talked to people, and of course, it negatively 
impacts our economy. It is no coincidence that we have had this 
debt and deficit grow and grow and then be followed by a period 
of high inflation. We can talk about that later, but there is 
no question that that affects strictly long-term rates, and our 
constituents are all suffering from that right now.
    A properly structured bipartisan fiscal commission can 
build trust, expand knowledge, and, yes, provide a little 
political cover to Members of Congress who want to do the right 
thing. This is going to require establishing a fiscal metric, 
which won't be easy. You know, what is our goal. It is also 
going to require making some tough choices, including 
conducting a top to bottom review of all Federal Government 
spending. Asking hard questions about the Federal role, rooting 
out parochial spending that doesn't help the national interest, 
finding new revenue in a way that minimizes economic growth and 
opportunity impacts, reform, of course, of the critically 
important but currently unsustainable entitlement programs, as 
was talked about, and Chairman, you had it just right, we have 
got to save these programs in essence. If we don't, as the 
Ranking Member said, Social Security benefits are going to be 
cut substantially as soon as 2033 or 2034, and of course, in 
general, entitlements will bankrupt the country. We all know 
that.
    In terms of budget reform, I think it would be great if the 
commission also took a crack at that, and I think all of you 
would agree that is needed. This is all necessary, but I think 
the first step of any commission is to really just tell the 
American people the truth about what is going on. They know 
that something is not right. They know the current trajectory 
is unsustainable, but they are looking for an honest assessment 
and an honest dialogue about the way forward. Not a partisan 
one, but one that is right down the middle. I think that is 
maybe the most important part of the commission.
    There are a lot of valid structures for a commission. Some 
of you, again, have your own proposals, and I am not saying 
that one is better than the other, but I do think having 
Members of Congress and some external folks involved who are 
real experts is important. I think to reduce some of the 
politics, the commission should report during the likely lame 
duck session of Congress after the 2024 elections. That is 
assuming this commission can get up and going soon, because I 
think it is going to take that much time to do it right. The 
question was what has worked and what hasn't worked. I think 
the law establishing the commission should create fast track 
consideration, culminating with a vote without amendment for a 
solution approved by a qualified majority, whatever that is, of 
the membership. I think that is the important thing of doing a 
statutory commission as opposed to others that have been tried, 
like Simpson-Bowles. What has worked, what hasn't worked, BRAC 
has worked, this Base Realignment and Closure process. There 
have been five BRAC rounds, as some of you know, estimated each 
round created an average of $12 billion in savings. That was 
tough going, but it did work in that sense. Another model would 
be the 1981 Greenspan Commission. It was a bipartisan group of 
experts and Members of Congress, respected Members of Congress. 
It saved the Federal Government over $165 billion in the first 
seven years, extended the life of Social Security by 30 years. 
That is not bad. They said it was going to extend it for longer 
than that, but 30 years is not bad.
    On Simpson-Bowles, we just mentioned that their 
comprehensive package of reforms, as you know, was not passed 
in the Congress, but it was a success in a way, because many of 
its proposals did become law. The Center for a Responsible 
Federal Budget has estimated that by 2015, Congress had enacted 
around 60 percent of those reductions in spending, those 
reforms that were proposed. So it did make a difference and 
Senator Conrad can talk more about that.
    We can learn from its failures, too, what didn't work. It 
was established by executive order and without Congressional 
approval. So there was no forcing mechanism to ensure a vote 
would occur. Also, the commission said you had to get 15 of 18 
members to agree. That was the majority. That is just too high, 
and it turned out to be a standard that was too hard to meet.
    So, look, when Americans take a look at us today, here in 
Congress, in Washington, they often despair as what they see is 
deep divisions, and I wish more could tune into events like 
this today where I think you are seeing between Republicans and 
Democrats the ability to look toward the future together, to 
collaborate in search of a solution that is best for the 
country.
    So thanks to the Committee Members for your willingness to 
take on the fiscal challenge and to look at new approaches, 
including a bipartisan fiscal commission.
    Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    [The information follows:]

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    Chairman Arrington. Thank you, Mr. Ambassador.
    Chairman Conrad, we yield five minutes to you, good sir.

STATEMENT OF HON. KENT CONRAD, SENIOR FELLOW, BIPARTISAN POLICY 
         CENTER, FORMER U.S. SENATOR FROM NORTH DAKOTA

    Mr. Conrad. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Chairman Arrington, Ranking Member Boyle, Members of the 
Committee, first I want to recognize the important work you all 
have done. Congressman Boyle, you have advanced a serious 
proposal and it takes guts to do that, and Chairman Arrington, 
you have certainly led the charge on having a commission so 
that we can wrestle with these issues with a mechanism that 
will allow bipartisan cooperation. So I want to recognize that.
    I also want to take a minute to recognize Chairman Yarmuth, 
somebody who I have enormously high regard for. I thought he 
was an outstanding Committee Chairman, and my former intern has 
succeeded him in his Congressional seat, Morgan McGarvey. So I 
am delighted to be with him today, and Chairman Womack, who is 
known on both sides of the aisle as someone of great integrity. 
We admire that, and I can say on both sides of the aisle, 
people recognize the job he did as Budget Committee Chairman, 
as a serious Member.
    On a personal note, if I can say Jimmy Panetta, your father 
was one of my all-time favorites. He was Budget Committee 
Chairman. I worked with him closely when he was the President's 
Chief of Staff. Really one of my favorite Members.
    I have given a formal statement and understand that will be 
made part of the record. I thought I would just summarize in 
going forward.
    First of all, I believe we have reached a defining moment. 
Our fiscal affairs are completely off track. There is one thing 
I think we could have bipartisan agreement on: we are off in 
the weeds, and we have got to get back on track. Deficits are 
rising and from an already too high level. Our debt is now over 
$33 trillion, as Senator Portman indicated. I should also say 
that when he was head of OMB, he and I were having discussions 
about how we could put together a bipartisan plan to get us 
back on track at that time, and I found him to be really a 
remarkably good partner in that effort. Our debt is now over 
122 percent of our GDP. CBO tells us we are headed for a debt 
of 192 percent of GDP. There is almost no economist that 
wouldn't say that challenges the fiscal integrity of the United 
States.
    A considerable part of that debt is held by foreign powers. 
That clearly compromises our global independence. Rising 
deficits and debt are an economic and a national security 
concern. The effect on the economy is really quite clear. We 
see heightened inflation, surging interest rates. That is 
damaging our economic growth and future income. To those who 
say deficits and debt don't matter, I say look to history. Ask 
the Germans after World War I, when they had to take a 
wheelbarrow full of cash to buy a pair of shoes, and ask them 
for what happened leading to World War II. Look to our own 
history. The Clinton Administration balanced the budget. The 
economic benefits that flowed from that are clear, record job 
creation, record economic growth, record reductions in poverty. 
Those are facts. Of course, deficits and debt matter. They may 
not matter immediately, but over time, it is clear and 
compelling that they matter. Rising debt means rising interest 
costs as interest rates rise as well.
    All we have to do is look at our three major trust funds. 
Social Security Trustees say it will be insolvent by 2033, 
meaning a cut to every Social Security beneficiary of 24 
percent. Medicare Trustees say it will be insolvent by 2031. If 
you don't have the revenue, the benefits will have to be 
reduced. That is the law. Highways, the Highway Trust fund 
headed for insolvency in 2028, requiring a cut of 47 percent. 
So what could be more clear? We are headed for serious results 
if we don't act. We need to act now.
    The political system seems ill equipped, parties are too 
divided, special interests too strong, incentives to attack 
anyone who proposes solutions, too inviting. The alternative, I 
believe, is to have a bipartisan fiscal commission. It has 
worked in the past. The Greenspan Commission, 1981, did extend 
the solvency of Social Security for more than 30 years. The 
BRAC process saved tremendously on the accounts of our national 
defense and improved military efficiency and preparedness, and 
Simpson-Bowles, although the total recommendations were not 
adopted, it did serve as a foundation for the Budget Control 
Act of 2011.
    The strength of a commission--the strength of a commission 
is to bridge partisan divides. It provides a mechanism for both 
sides to work together to solve problems. To be effective, I 
believe everything has got to be on the table, and by 
everything, I mean everything. Entitlements, domestic 
discretionary, revenue. The longer we wait, the more draconian 
the solutions are going to have to be. The longer we wait, the 
more draconian the solutions are going to have to be. That is a 
mathematical certainty.
    I also believe for the commission to be effective, it has 
got to be truly bipartisan. Members from both chambers, both 
parties, outside experts, and I believe the White House. I 
thought that was one of the strengths of Simpson-Bowles, was to 
have the White House involved. After all, you have got to have 
all stakeholders. Everybody is going to have to be involved in 
the final in getting the legislation passed and signed.
    I also think it is critical that the commission assure an 
up or down vote on the product. We are at a critical juncture. 
A commission may be the best shot we have to help us get back 
on track. The parties' divide appears intractable, just as our 
fiscal trajectory seems unsustainable, but all parties can be 
part of the solution. I believe a bipartisan commission is the 
most promising opportunity to begin this work.
    Thank you for holding this important hearing.
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    Chairman Arrington. Chairman, thank you so much.
    We now yield five minutes to Chairman Womack.

 STATEMENT OF HON. STEVE WOMACK, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS 
   FROM THE STATE OF ARKANSAS, FORMER CHAIRMAN OF THE HOUSE 
                    COMMITTEE ON THE BUDGET

    Mr. Womack. I thank the Chairman and the Ranking Member.
    And what an awesome, very humbling experience this is for 
me to sit with these luminaries, these distinguished gentlemen 
from the Senate, Senator Portman, Senator Conrad, and my dear, 
dear, dear friend, John Yarmuth, and the work that he did and 
the work that we did and the absolute cooperation and respect 
that we gave each other. Mr. Chairman, I am so proud of you.
    For those that don't know, when I was asked to co-chair the 
Joint Select Committee on Budget Process Reform, when Speaker 
Ryan called me in his office and asked me to do this, I said, I 
am willing. He gave me the structure that had been provided for 
by law, and I knew that there were going to be four members of 
the House, four of the Senate, each party, and I said, but in 
order to do this, I am going to ask, just have one request, and 
that is that this is like hiring a coach. I need to bring an 
assistant with me that I know and can trust, and he said, who 
do you want, and I said, well, I want Jodey Arrington, but he 
is a freshman. I want Jodey Arrington, and, Jodey, you never 
disappoint. I am so, so very proud of you.
    And Brendan Boyle, remarkable person, dear friend, and the 
work that you are doing. So thank you.
    And to the other panelists, some that served with me when I 
was Chairman of this Committee that are still here today, and I 
am eternally grateful for the work that all of you do and have 
done.
    I am encouraged by the recent public support for the fiscal 
commission that would address the challenges our Nation is 
facing, and as has been mentioned, some of the themes that I 
will trumpet here this morning have already been covered and 
deserve to be repeated. One of the biggest challenges is the 
size of the sovereign debt and the fact that it is growing. 
Truly one of the greatest threats to American prosperity, and 
while some would argue the greatest threat, I would hasten to 
remind everybody in here that in my strong opinion, the 
greatest threat to the Republic as we know it is the division 
in the body politic, and Exhibit A is what is going on right 
now.
    This Congress is going to have to muster the courage to fix 
this, and we can no longer hide behind the politics of 
everything. We have to come together. It is a national security 
issue, it is an economic security issue, and the American 
public is relying on us to fix this.
    We are having long and drawn out food fights, as I call it, 
over discretionary spending. This has been going on since I 
have come to Congress. That is not our problem. It is what we 
fight most about on spending, but it is not our problem. 
Without reforms, without considering everything on the table, 
as Senator Conrad has just articulated, the trust funds of 
Medicare and Social Security, the two biggest programs, face 
insolvency, and we need to tackle the fiscal dysfunction, and I 
believe a fiscal commission is part of that.
    Now, Mr. Chairman, I will also tell you that in order for 
this to be successful we have to win the hearts and minds of 
the people we serve, and somehow we have to make our 
constituents subject matter experts on our situation, because 
it is not happening to them as we speak, unless, of course, 
they are recognizing the inflationary spirals that are 
happening, the fact that now home mortgage rates are in the A 
handle. That is when it begins to dawn on people, but then it 
becomes too late. So we have to find a way to educate the 
people we serve. So I am a strong believer in a Fiscal State of 
the Union. In my opinion, a Fiscal State of the Union would 
serve a far greater purpose than our annual State of the Union.
    Now, this Joint Select Committee that Jodey and I and my 
Ranking Member served on did a lot of great work, and the good 
thing about the work is, while it didn't get across the finish 
line, it is still great work and it still provides at least a 
blueprint for where we can go from here. The ideas and the 
changes and the reforms that were advocated for, biennial 
budgeting, annual appropriations, annual reconciliation, all of 
those things and others that didn't make it into the proposal, 
they are still fresh and they will still work if we can just 
muster the courage to take them on. That final proposal, 
developed with input from Members and all stakeholders across 
the board, the co-chair and I agreed to the base text, 
additional amendments were added, bipartisan ideas were found, 
proposals were explored for future reformers, and we went to 
vote. I don't know if you remember this, Mr. Yarmuth, but the 
request was that we needed to pause on the vote because of 
expedited procedures in the Senate and get some assurance that 
nothing was going to be placed into the proposal that had 
nothing to do with the proposal. You remember, we never got 
that assurance, and so when the final vote was taken, as I 
recall, there were five Republicans, the minimum needed, that 
were for it, and there were two Democrats, one of them sitting 
right here to my left, that were for it, but four Members on 
the Democrat side voted present. They loved the ideas, but they 
needed assurance that this was not going to be a vehicle by 
which other non-germane issues were going to be attached.
    That is the problem with Washington, and that is what we 
need to fix.
    I have strayed from my prepared remarks because I get 
really emotional about these things, but I will say, as Senator 
Conrad said, that whatever we do and however we proceed, every 
single possibility has to be on the table. For to remove a 
proposal or an option from the table only increases the 
draconian cost, if you will, of the remaining items, and 
Senator Portman said that the good news is we have a little 
time, which is the absolute worst thing you can say to the 
United States Congress.
    I will finish this way. This is a matter of urgency. It is 
imperative that the Congress begin to act immediately, and the 
failure to do so could indeed signal the end of the Republic as 
we know it.
    With that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my 
time.
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    Chairman Arrington. Chairman Womack, thank you for your 
remarks.
    I will now yield to the good gentleman from the 
Commonwealth, Chairman Yarmuth, for five minutes.

STATEMENT OF HON. JOHN YARMUTH, FORMER U.S. REPRESENTATIVE FOR 
 ARKANSAS, FORMER CHAIRMAN OF THE HOUSE COMMITTEE ON THE BUDGET

    Mr. Yarmuth. Thank you very much, Chairman Arrington, 
Ranking Member Boyle, Members of the Committee.
    Let me echo and underline the kind comments that Mr. Womack 
has made and Senator Conrad and others and say it is a great 
honor for me to be part of this panel, even though I am going 
to be that proverbial object in the punch bowl and say that 
when I was Steve Womack's Ranking Member, and then he was my 
Ranking Member, and I can't imagine having had a more mutually 
respectful, collegial, and serious partnership than the two of 
us have had and still have, and I was proud to come and say a 
few remarks when his portrait was unveiled here, and I hope he 
will return when I am here to unveil my portrait.
    But anyway, I am honored to be here before the Committee I 
once chaired to discuss proposals to create another--and I say 
that with purposeful skepticism--commission on the Federal 
fiscal condition. Having served in Congress during a period 
that saw at least four different attempts to assist Congress 
with doing one of its most fundamental jobs, I can only 
characterize this new commission proposal as the proverbial 
definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over and 
expecting a different result. As has been discussed, I spent a 
large amount of time in 2018 as a Member of the Joint Select 
Committee on Budget and Appropriations Process Reform under the 
very thoughtful leadership of Mr. Womack. I was constantly 
impressed with the seriousness of the Committee's discussions 
and hearings. Many well meaning people from outside and inside 
of Congress offered their thoughts on how we could reform our 
budgeting process and appropriations process, primarily, I 
think, with the implicit goal of reducing our annual deficits 
and the national debt.
    While some of the other Members of that Committee, and we 
have two of them here, may take issue with my evaluation, I 
believe the process illuminated one fairly obvious but 
unavoidable truth: the problem is not the process, it is the 
people. In other words, if Members of Congress are not 
willing--and this phrase has already been used--to muster the 
determination and courage to take on our fiscal challenges, 
even the best ideas will never be implemented. I would argue 
the same conclusion could be reached about the Domenici-Rivlin 
task force and Simpson-Bowles Commission, and even those who 
think the 2011 Budget Control Act was effective must remember 
that the only reason it was enacted was because it avoided a 
default on our debt, and that virtually every year we waived 
the budget caps because they were impractical and unpopular, 
and there was bipartisan relief when that law expired in 2021. 
Plus, the commission established under that law could not reach 
a consensus on any new course of action, and by the way, the 
national debt doubled during the ten years the budget caps of 
the 2011 Act were in effect.
    Of course, every one of these efforts stems from the 
presumption that our debt and deficits are unsustainable. I 
heard that argument every one of the 16 years I served in this 
body. I am sure that back during the Lincoln Administration, 
when the national debt reached $1 billion dollars, people were 
warning that they were leaving an unsustainable burden on their 
grandchildren. I know they were saying that when the debt 
reached $1 trillion dollars during the Reagan years. Correct me 
if I am wrong, but I don't know one grandchild who has ever 
been asked to repay a penny of that debt. I have two young 
grandsons and the last thing I worry about for them is that 
they will have to pay back some of the national debt.
    If you believe, as most do, that it would be better for us 
not to have trillion dollar annual deficits and $33 trillion in 
debt, the course of action is not a mystery. You either cut 
spending or raise revenues or both. Doing that is Congress' job 
and not a commission's or task force's, not even the Bipartisan 
Bicameral Committee we had in 2018. So I would like to offer 
some other suggestions.
    Why not have the Oversight Committee actually do oversight 
on some of the more expensive government activities and see 
where money can be saved rather than holding wasteful hearings 
on Hunter Biden and his laptop? Why not have the Ways and Means 
Committee meaningfully explore the Social Security and Medicare 
programs to see how their fiscal conditions can be 
strengthened? And let me say as an aside on Social Security, 
everybody says there are only three courses of action on Social 
Security: raise revenues, raise the retirement age, or reduce 
benefits. There is another answer. The only reason the trust 
fund is an issue is because the law says that benefits have to 
be paid out of the trust fund. Congress can change the law, say 
that benefits are paid out of the general fund. Then the trust 
fund issue goes away like that. There is another way that 
Congress can act because Congress basically sets the interest 
rate that the Social Security trust fund gets from the 
government. So the premiums come in, Social Security payments 
come in, Treasury issues bonds to the trust fund. They are not 
normal government bonds, they are bonds, a special issue that 
can't be marketed, and they bear an interest rate that Congress 
sets the formula for. Congress can change that. So there are 
options available to us, but it takes serious thoughts on the 
ways of Congress.
    What else can we do? The Energy and Commerce Committee can 
do the same thing with Medicaid, and while they are at that 
one, they can passionately look at the oil subsidies that cost 
us billions. Same with sugar subsidies that not only have 
direct costs, but enormous indirect healthcare costs.
    And finally, maybe this Committee can actually analyze the 
national debt issue to determine whether the debt we have and 
will have is really unsustainable or not, and how can we judge 
that moving forward? It can't be just looking at a graph with a 
constantly rising line and getting scared.
    One final thought is that commissions and task forces don't 
have souls. Hopefully, Members of Congress do. A government 
without a soul is not a functioning government, regardless of 
how much or how little it costs.
    I look forward to your questions.
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    Chairman Arrington. I thank the Chairman, and we need to 
make sure that we have attainable aspirations in this 
Committee, so to suggest that we are going to need Members of 
Congress to have a soul is a really difficult start to this 
conversation.
    I am not going to ask any questions. I want to make a 
comment, and then I am going to defer to my colleagues.
    It is so unfortunate, but our conferences have called 
meetings at 11:00, both sides, and I hate that because this is 
the beginning of a very important conversation, and I just want 
you to know that my desire and what I will work towards 
accomplishing is inviting both the Democrats and Republicans in 
our conference more broadly in an auditorium to have a 
bipartisan discussion and panel Q&A with you all here. So we 
will have more time for discussion, but we have to break. I 
will probably stay till 11:15. Some Members will leave, so just 
understand that is what that is about.
    I am going to resist actually making any more comments. I 
appreciate the diverse opinions and the contrarian views. Now 
let's debate and let's seek the counsel of our gentlemen in 
front of us.
    I am going to defer to Mr. McClintock for my set of 
questions. Can I do that? Can he ask my questions and I will 
just go?
    Mr. Boyle. I think so.
    Chairman Arrington. Let me do that. I yield five minutes, 
but let's try to make it as quick as we can to let everybody 
have their time to ask their questions.
    Mr. McClintock.
    Mr. McClintock. I am not going to take five minutes.
    I don't want to shock everybody, especially myself, but I 
agree with what John Yarmuth said. He has either gotten a lot 
wiser since he left Congress or I have gotten a lot dumber, but 
one way or another, we have had a meeting in the minds. 
Shakespeare put it best: ``the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in 
our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.'' You 
know, all the CYA commissions we can think of won't work 
without people willing to make hard decisions. There is no 
substitute for leadership and courage and common sense. The 
budget process only works when the House leadership is willing 
to exercise that courage and common sense and make fiscal 
responsibility an absolute priority and insist on it throughout 
the House.
    Under Newt Gingrich and John Kasich we had that leadership 
and we had that determination and we had a President who was 
willing to work with them, and we balanced the budget four 
years in a row and set this country back on course toward 
fiscal balance. The Chairman is correct, we haven't done our 
jobs. So it is just easier to blame the process and now propose 
to hand that hot potato off to an unelected commission, 
presumably exercising superhuman wisdom that we haven't been 
able to summon, and when our constituents complain, we just 
have to say, hey, it is in the hands of a bipartisan 
commission, and they will figure it out. Well, we missed the 
central point. The ultimate bipartisan commission in this 
Nation is called the Congress, and this Congress, as imperfect 
as it is, is where these decisions must be made. Passing the 
buck is simply not the answer, because the buck stops here. A 
dollar cannot be spent by this government until and unless this 
House says that it can be spent. So there is no substitute for 
Congress, and if it hasn't worked recently, we need to look at 
ourselves and not farm it out to others.
    There is no shortage of experts and think tanks left, 
right, and center, with every conceivable solution to our 
problems. Some are really good, some are really bad, and it is 
our job to know the difference and to act accordingly. There 
has been a House rule since 1836 that forbids any expenditure 
of funds not authorized by law. That provision requires exactly 
the oversight and review that Mr. Yarmuth recommends, but we 
always waive that rule, throw billions of dollars at programs 
whose authorization has expired decades ago, and then go about 
our business as if nothing has happened. The budget process 
that is in place offers a logical step by step process for 
responsible, serious budgeting if we would simply use it, and 
it did work when Congress used it and insisted on it.
    It is true, we are badly divided by partisanship because 
the American people are badly divided by partisanship, and what 
is Congress but a reflection of the people? Madison said if 
every Member of Congress were a Socrates, they would still 
behave like a mob. Our fiscal situation is dire because of bad 
decisions made here over many years and it can only be 
corrected here. It is becoming so dire that it cannot be 
ignored much longer. Reality, I think, is about to catch up 
with us, and we are going to, as Lincoln once said, need to 
rise with the occasion, to disenthral ourselves and then save 
our country.
    Anything you would like to add Mr. Yarmuth? I never thought 
I would be inviting this, but your testimony is spot on.
    Mr. Yarmuth. Well, I appreciate that.
    No, I never thought we would agree on anything either, and 
Steve Womack mentioned this as well, if you go back and look at 
Greenspan, you are talking about 1981. It was a different world 
in 1981 in terms of the geopolitical climate in this country. 
We had liberals and conservatives in both parties. So there was 
always something you could find common ground with in the other 
party. That doesn't exist anymore, and on most issues, we 
default to our party's position and we don't take the time to 
really----
    Mr. McClintock. But the process does work, after a fashion. 
The reason we built that beautiful building was to do one thing 
and one thing only, it was to talk out our differences, and we 
need to get back to that, and not in a commission, but here.
    Mr. Yarmuth. We absolutely do, and we can't--I haven't been 
out of it so long that I can't say we still, but Congress can 
be the role models that will help the people change their 
perspective on what they want us to be.
    Chairman Arrington. I thank the gentleman from California. 
His time has expired.
    I now recognize Ranking Member Boyle from Pennsylvania for 
any questions.
    Mr. Boyle. Yeah, thank you.
    Mr. Chairman, first, I ask--I have quite a laundry list 
here, so bear with me. I ask unanimous consent to include into 
the record the following, a statement for the record from Max 
Richtman, President and CEO of the National Committee to 
Preserve Social Security and Medicare, Congressional testimony. 
Statement for the record from AFGE, the American Federation of 
Government Employees, a letter to both of us from AFSME, a 
letter for the record from the Bipartisan Policy Center, a 
piece from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, written 
by Sharon Parrot and Joel Friedman, and finally, a letter to 
the both of us from Strengthen Social Security.
    Chairman Arrington. With regard to all the above, without 
objection, so ordered.
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    Mr. Boyle. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    So following your lead, and given the unfortunate timing 
that both of our caucuses have called for internal meetings 
beginning at 11:00, I will defer my questions then and yield to 
Mr. Higgins.
    But before I do, I will just say one thing. I want to 
underscore something that Chairman Womack said, and it is 
beyond just this Committee. Our internal divisions as a 
Congress, and increasingly as a country, is a massive national 
security threat, and all of us as elected officials have a real 
responsibility, a solemn responsibility, to not play into that 
or exacerbate it, but to attempt to heal the divide, because if 
not, we are going down a very dangerous road.
    And with that, I will yield to Mr. Higgins.
    Chairman Arrington. We will give Mr. Higgins his full five 
minutes.
    Mr. Higgins. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, thank you, Ranking 
Member, and thank you, distinguished panel here.
    I would prefer to look at this issue from a position of 
strength. The United States is five percent of the world's 
population, we are 25 percent of the world's economy. You look 
at every measure, and it is reported clearly in The Economist 
magazine, about the growth of American prosperity within a 
world context. In 1990, America represented 40 percent of the 
wealth, the top seven economies in the world. Today, it is 58 
percent. You look at productivity, you look at the workforce in 
America, it far exceeds that in the last 20 years of Europe, of 
China, of Japan, and the American economy does best when we 
invest in the growth of the American economy.
    So when we look at debt and deficit, we have to look at the 
contemporary history, and America grows down its debt and 
deficit when the economy grows. So finding ways to expand the 
middle class is essential to dealing with debt and deficit over 
the longer term. Peter Drucker, the great Harvard economist in 
the 1960s and 1970s, said that the whole purpose of creating an 
economy is to create a middle class. They pay our taxes, they 
fight our wars, they protect our neighborhoods, they teach our 
children, they take care of our people in terms of healthcare, 
and the strength of a society generally is viewed based on the 
size of your middle class. So I think that is essentially 
important.
    You think about all of the difficulty that we have overcome 
as a Nation, particularly in the age of the pandemic, you know, 
nobody was lining up for Russian and Chinese vaccines, they 
were lining up for American vaccines, and the messenger RNA 
technology that was developed with taxpayer dollars, with 
taxpayer dollars over a 30 year period. It is the genetic 
material that tells a cell to make a protein which is the 
active ingredient in the vaccine. It saved a million people and 
helped cure another 45 million people.
    12 of the top universities in the world, of the 15 top 
universities in the world, are in the United States. We are a 
dynamic economy, we are an innovative economy, we are a 
destination for people all over the world that want to 
experience the American dream, and when they succeed, we 
succeed as a nation.
    So I appreciate all the talk about how horrible things are, 
but let me tell you something, they ain't all that horrible, 
and Bloomberg Analytics in February of this year had 15 
economists focus in on 15 areas of the American economy. They 
said, not me, that Joe Biden is on his way to being the 
greatest jobs producing President in the history of the United 
States. The unemployment rate is at a 54 year low. Last year at 
this time, inflation was at 8.1 percent, now it is down to 
about three percent and continues to come down. So Democrats 
and Republicans, many of whom here profess to be concerned only 
about the American people and the American economy--and I 
believe that, I believe that--but I think all of us would be 
much better off focusing in on the strength of America as a 
basis from which to grow and to deal with our problems and stop 
pointing fingers because, historically, each party has played a 
role in the responsibility for the decline, but each party 
should also be embracing and celebrating the great economy that 
is built and that of which is America.
    So, Mr. Yarmuth, I would say to you, as the former Chair of 
this Committee, your views about how we can use the strength of 
the American economy and the dynamic nature of the American 
economy within the context of the global economy to continue to 
grow and create opportunities for the American people.
    Mr. Yarmuth. Well, I appreciate your comments, Mr. Higgins.
    And what I would say is I think when you look at the 
American economy, this is the question that everybody should 
ask when we are talking about debt and deficits, because $33 
trillion, the vast majority of that $33 trillion represents 
investments that the government has made in the American 
people. That money has gone into the economy, it has gone into 
the American people's hands, and until the Fed began raising 
interest rates just a year and a half or so ago, you can make a 
pretty strong case that the national debt grew by a significant 
amount without any negative impact on the economy, on the 
strength of the dollar, on the interest rates, and on 
inflation, and the pandemic changed everything and created a 
situation which will take years to analyze, but we went from 
basically 2008 to 2020 with a huge growth in the federal debt 
and again, no negative impact on any of those key factors.
    So that is why I suggest that before we start talking about 
whether the debt and deficits are problems, we ought to 
actually try to get a really good look at what is sustainable 
and what is not, and we are a sovereign currency, we can print 
all the money we want to serve the people whom we serve. I 
don't know what the right measurement is. Japan has national 
debt that is 240 percent of their GDP. They issue bonds from 
their government with statutory zero percent interest rate, and 
people buy them. So we can answer the question, why are we 
paying interest on the money we borrow? And why do we borrow 
money anyway? We can print it and put it in the Treasury.
    So I just think there is a lot of analysis that we need to 
do to look at how the money system works in this country and 
whether we really have something to worry about.
    And again, with the strong economy, I think you can make a 
pretty strong case that our debt is not holding us back at this 
point.
    Chairman Arrington. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The 
gentleman's time has expired.
    We are going to move to three minute Q&A period for each of 
the Members that are remaining. Again, I know there are a lot 
of folks in here who wanted to share their thoughts and ask you 
questions, but we will have to do this again.
    Mr. Grothman from Wisconsin.
    Mr. Grothman. Yeah, I guess we are a divided country. I 
heard some of the comments from the other side of the aisle. I 
don't know if they show up. Some of the people I hang around 
with, they say signs of America's greatness are its 
universities and its COVID response, I will tell you, there is 
a whole other world out there that does not feel that our 
universities are right now what they should be and I think the 
COVID response is good, and as far as helping the middle class, 
I think the difficulty in buying a house or buying a car today 
are about the toughest I can remember in my lifetime. It really 
threatens the middle class, but I will ask a question, too. We 
will talk to Mr. Portman. When I look at the problems we have--
first of all, I agree with Mr. Yarmuth on Social Security. We 
should begin to look at the general fund. I kind of look at the 
budget as a whole. As far as the people saying, I think Social 
Security is the one thing we can't cut, because we have made 
certain promises to the American people. I know there are some 
politicians who like to brag, look at me, I am so tough, I am 
going to cut Social Security. I think it is the one thing we 
can't cut.
    What I am going to ask you whether in your experience here, 
people have at all talked about getting back to our 
Constitution, and I realize it might be a relatively small 
overall percent of our budget, some of the programs, but when I 
look at all the people around here who think it is the Federal 
Government to deal with housing, or the Federal Government's 
responsibility to deal with education or income transfer 
payments or commerce, it just drives me up a wall, because, of 
course, our forefathers never would have guessed to this degree 
we get involved in these things. In any of the things that you 
have been involved with, have you looked what the deficit would 
be if we just transferred all this stuff back to the states and 
said, look at constituents, these may be good programs, they 
may not be, but we are broke, and you should talk to your state 
legislature about them and see where we would wind up if we 
took all these programs and just said, here states, you decide 
whether you want to raise the revenue for them.
    Mr. Portman. Well, first, thanks for your good question.
    You saw in my testimony I talked about looking at the role 
of the Federal Government, and that is for the reason you just 
stated. It has grown dramatically, as you know, over time to 
the point that our spending as a country has gone from, when I 
last testified before this Committee, which was about 16 years 
ago, to today, we were spending $2.6 trillion then, we are 
spending about $6.3 trillion now.
    Mr. Grothman. Right. Do you think the American public is 
persuadable that there are certain things that are state and 
local, the Federal Government has got to get rid of and we 
balance the budget that way?
    Mr. Portman. Well, I think there are, but we have to remind 
ourselves that although we ought to do that, and I said that in 
my testimony, and I believe it, about 70 percent of the 
spending today is on autopilot, and so it is not part of that 
30 percent. Now, that includes interest on the debt, but 
significantly, as we said earlier----
    Mr. Grothman. Oh, some of that autopilot, though, is 
unconstitutional, too, but go ahead.
    Mr. Portman. Yeah, but we just have to realize that, that 
we are not going to solve the problem there, but it is a big 
part of what I think any commission ought to do, is do a top to 
bottom review of everything and look at what the Federal role 
is, and in some cases, the states should take a bigger 
responsibility, and I think you look historically, that has 
been the case.
    I will also say, in terms of your comment on interest 
rates, you are absolutely right, and it is not just a 
coincidence. I mean, look at what Fitch and Moody's have said. 
Fitch has already downgraded our debt, Moody's has threatened 
to do so, and that raises long-term rates to the point that, as 
you indicate, we now have constituents--you have constituents 
who are paying eight percent on their mortgage and their car 
payments are out of control. So this is directly related to 
this problem.
    Both Fitch and Moody's, by the way, said that dysfunction 
in Washington and the fiscal crisis, the fiscal impending 
crisis, is what influenced them to say, I am not sure this 
American debt ought to get a high rating anymore. So it 
directly relates to interest rates and therefore to your 
constituents and others who are suffering in this economy 
because of high inflation and high interest rates.
    Mr. Grothman. Thank you.
    Mr. Moore [presiding]. The Chair now recognizes Ms. 
Schakowsky.
    Ms. Schakowsky. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    I admire the tone that has predominated in this meeting. I 
do not feel as sanguine, and it seems to me as we talk about a 
fiscal commission, and I agree with my dear friend, John 
Yarmuth, that when we have a functioning Congress, when we have 
a functioning House of Representatives, enough tools to be able 
to deal with these questions.
    I want to focus mostly on Social Security and Medicare, 
which always seems to come up as a target, along with--we were 
both on the Simpson-Bowles Commission, Senator. I have my own 
position, because I was worried about Social Security and 
Medicare, offered my own proposal. We didn't get one at all. 
Social Security right now is so modest. We are talking about an 
average of $17,536 a year and about $2,000 less for women. So 
modest, barely making it, and Medicare, right now there are 57 
million Americans, older Americans, and eight million people 
with disabilities that rely on it, and I agree totally with our 
Ranking Member that what we ought to do if we come up with a 
fiscal answer is just ask the wealthiest Americans to pay a bit 
more, not to cut what we call an entitlement. Really? Social 
Security, people pay every single paycheck to get that money 
when they retire and to call it an entitlement is just 
absolutely wrong.
    So I want to ask you, my friend John Yarmuth, our former 
Chair of this Committee, what is your view on how we deal with 
those issues that affect everyday Americans in the deepest 
sense, and what do you think that we should do?
    Mr. Yarmuth. Well, I certainly don't have all the answers, 
but I think, again, as a Congress, in my 16 years here, we 
spent virtually no time actually analyzing the way government 
operates, the services that we provide, the funding mechanisms. 
I was on the Oversight Committee my first term in Congress, we 
never did oversight on any one program. We were busy 
investigating, and I had a ball doing it. I loved doing--but 
investigating the Bush Administration, and then of course, we 
had the financial crisis in 2008 and we spent a lot of time on 
that, but this Congress does not do nearly enough to analyze 
the activities that we do.
    And I think we all complain about taxes. I know a lot of 
people resist raising taxes, but we have one of the lowest tax 
burdens as a Federal Government than any developed country in 
the world. Politically, we don't like doing that. We have a 
complicated problem because we have states, some states that 
have very heavy tax burdens, some that have none. So that adds 
to the total impact on our citizens, but by and large, again, 
the $33 trillion that we are in debt is investments we made in 
the people, and the people rely on those investments, they rely 
on Social Security. As you said, two-thirds of the people who 
get Social Security, that represents more than half their 
income. A third of them, it is their entire income, and I think 
the one thing we have to look at also is in terms of Medicare, 
Medicare, there are actually some very positive signs going on 
in Medicare as we drive prescription drug prices down. 
Actually, research is making a lot of diseases that were very 
costly, more manageable and so forth.
    So again, I think it is just Congress' responsibility to 
spend more time focused on what we do and how we do it.
    Ms. Schakowsky. Thank you.
    Mr. Moore. Thank you, and I will now recognize myself for 
some brief comments.
    First, I would like to submit for the record for unanimous 
consent, several organizations have provided input, including 
the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, of the 
importance of a bipartisan fiscal commission.
    [The information follows:]

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    I'm in my second term, so I ascended to the Chair pretty 
quickly. This is the only reason I am here. I sat and watched 
for 20 years. I agree, I absolutely agree, this is the place we 
should fix this. The Congress is the bipartisan group that 
should actually do this. I am not going to sit around and watch 
for another 20 years, us not be able to do it. A bipartisan 
fiscal commission will not be easy for any single person on 
this side of the aisle or this side of the aisle to vote for, 
but the fundamental problem is that we haven't had a chance to 
vote on it yet. The Members on the lower part of the dais, we 
all want to fix this, we all want to be a part of the solution 
here, right. We need a catalyst to get it so it comes to the 
floor, and as I have talked in every speaker debate, the battle 
that I have had, I didn't expect to have so many conversations 
about this in nine months, but every single time I said we have 
to have a debt commission because Congress has failed to do 
this.
    I sat there for 20 years as I was kind of, like, watching, 
right, like, what in the world, why can't we get this figured 
out? Utah has a rainy day fund, we have a balanced budget every 
single year, and I get Federal Government is different than 
state government, I get it, folks, but we have not fixed the 
problem. We knew that baby boomers were going to start retiring 
at a very rapid rate in 2008, and so what did we do the years 
prior to that? We bickered back and forth and we didn't solve 
the problem. We did not prepare for when baby boomers were 
going to start to enroll in Social Security and Medicare at a 
rapid rate, and if you look at it, from 1994 to 2008, there was 
a few hundred thousand that were added. From 2008 to beyond it 
is like two million almost a year, right. So we have got a 
fundamental problem that we didn't prepare for. This fiscal 
commission is going to force us. It is going to bypass 
leadership, it is going to get to the floor and actually be 
able to be voted on, and guess what? All the work that was done 
from all of you on this panel will be included in it because 
you had amazing thought, you had the right direction. We just 
have to make action happen, and it has to be uncomfortable for 
every single one of us.
    Senator Portman, the question that I did have when I had 
five minutes, I don't have as much, anything to the structure 
of this that will create the right type of outcomes that we 
want to do? Like, could you speak to anything that you have 
watched this from past? You have an amazing record of working 
in a bipartisan manner to solve some of these problems. 
Anything that you would like to just mention that needs to be 
structurally sound with this commission so we can actually get 
something done?
    Mr. Portman. Well, first, I appreciate your passion for 
this issue and specifically the fiscal commission, but much 
more importantly that you realize that Congress has not been 
able to solve these problems. To your colleagues who said, why 
can't we just do it? We have tried, we have tried, and people 
say, well, when John Kasich was Chairman of this Committee, we 
had a balanced budget. I was on the Committee during that time. 
I was the leadership rep to the Budget Committee. Ladies and 
gentlemen, it was an entirely different situation. Forget the 
fact that Republicans and Democrats were working better 
together, we were not in the fiscal hole we are in now. I mean, 
we are talking about a $2 trillion deficit likely this year 
versus a zero deficit. Think about that. We were looking then 
at about 60 percent GDP, today you are 120 percent of GDP. It 
is a totally different ballgame. So we are in a situation, I 
believe, where if we don't fix it, we are going to have to make 
some very tough adjustments to these really important 
entitlement programs, but our economy, the interest rates, and 
the inflation over time is going to eat up more and more of our 
paychecks from our constituents, but interest rates alone, 
think about this if we are talking about eight percent long 
term rates, what is that going to do to the debt and deficit? 
It just explodes it. So we have got to do something, and my 
sense is yours, which is we need a catalyst. I guess the worst 
case scenario is the commission works on a bipartisan basis, is 
not able to come up with something, but at least we have got 
this issue raised and we are talking about it. The second worst 
case is it comes to the floor of the House and Senate and can't 
pass. At least you are talking about it. At least it forces you 
to deal with this issue, and I think all of you on this 
Committee ought to be for that because this is the Committee 
that wants that issue to be front and center, and again, I said 
earlier, I applaud you all because a lot of you have taken a 
lead on these issues and come up with your own policy 
proposals.
    I see Mr. Peters, and I want to hear from him because he is 
one of them that has. It takes some guts to do it, and I 
appreciate your passion. Hope you continue it.
    Mr. Moore. I will reserve some of my questions later. I am 
now the Chair, so I guess I can do whatever I want.
    Mr. Peters. Just go to five minutes.
    Mr. Moore. And we will go to Representative Peters from 
California.
    Mr. Peters. I hate when they say something I do takes guts. 
That is probably a bad signal, but I appreciate all the 
witnesses being here, and I will try to deal with my three 
minutes as well.
    Look, I am frustrated with our inability to deal with this 
in this Congress. I came to Congress to work on things like 
that. I thought it would work better. The budgets I have been--
and 75 percent of the Congress, this is how new we are, came in 
with me in 2013 or after, after Simpson-Bowles. So they are not 
familiar in the way you said, Senator, that we talk about these 
things, that there was sort of common parlance maybe back in 
2011. We all post date that, and since I have been here, the 
budgets are political. As a difficult Member, you have a 
difficult race, whatever it was, the instruction was always to 
vote against it. Mr. Arrington produced a budget, it is a 
political document. I think we just have to acknowledge that. 
If we do budgets at all. Sometimes we don't even do budgets, 
right. So it is not working here. It is just not working, and I 
don't think the American people would give us much talk back 
about that. So, yes, we have the power to do it, but we don't 
seem to have the will to do it, and I am worried we don't have 
the capacity to do it.
    I think we have gotten out of the mechanics of doing deals 
here that seem natural to me, even as a trial lawyer, is to 
settle cases. That was part of what we did. That doesn't happen 
here. It just doesn't happen here. Then we will make speeches 
about what the best answer is, and then we will go walk our own 
way. We have made our record, we haven't made progress.
    It is a different situation here now. Now we are borrowing 
almost $2 trillion a year just to pay our expenses. We are 
putting groceries on the credit card, and as a result of that, 
this year we are spending $663 billion in interest. That is not 
investment, that is not money that is going into any good use. 
That is paying for what we already did in the past. By 2027, we 
will be spending more on interest than we are on defense. As a 
Democrat, I really want to do the Child Tax Credit. I can tell 
you, I think that is one of the most important anti-poverty, 
pro children investments we can do. It is expensive. I can't 
afford it if we spend all the money on interest. I can't make 
that argument.
    I also say, finally, that the answer has got to be 
bipartisan. It just is obvious to me that politics is as much 
of a fact here as science or numbers or arithmetic or anything 
else. You need 218, you need 60, and here is why I think 
Democrats should be interested in a commission like the one I 
proposed, but there are other variations, one is on Medicare 
and Social Security. I think that there are people who want to 
cut Medicare and Social Security. I am on Jan's side, Jan 
Schakowsky's side. I want to preserve that program, but current 
law doesn't provide for general fund funding, current law 
doesn't provide for the good integrity proposal that Mr. Boyle 
proposed or that Mr. Larson has proposed. Current law is going 
to cut benefits by 23, 25 percent when the lines cross, and if 
you want to cut Medicare and Social Security, what you do is 
nothing because you are already on track to win that battle if 
that is what your real goal is. If you want to save it, the 
sooner you do it, the better off we are. I don't see that 
happening without a commission. That is why we have to have it.
    The other thing is, finally, on tax cuts, I railed against 
the Republican tax cuts in 2017, which were projected and have 
proven out to cost $1.9 trillion. Right. Which, by the way, 
every year we are borrowing that amount. So that wasn't all 
that much of an unusual event, and we are going to see the same 
pressure from Republicans to extend those in 2025, and if we 
don't have a cop on the beat, this commission, we are going to 
have the same conversation where I am told that these things 
pay for themselves. I am tired of that. Democrats need to push 
back on that. To do that, we need people in the room dealing 
with facts. I don't see a way to do it other than a commission. 
I hope we will get around to that. I really think it is the 
only practical way to deal with this problem, because I think 
we have proven over 20 years that this doesn't work, and people 
come to me now and they say, back in 1993, we did it this way, 
back in 1983, we did it this way. Are you kidding me? This is 
not that place, and I have been here long enough to see we are 
not making deals, we are not talking facts.
    I am going to say, finally, this Chairman and this Ranking 
Member have been really good, set a good example for how to not 
be performative, but we are still not getting the job done 
here, and I think we need a kick in the pants. We need the 
support of people in the room dealing with facts, outside 
experts and members working together. I think we should give it 
a shot.
    And I yield.
    Mr. Boyle. If it is okay, I know Mr. Doggett is being 
recognized, can I just be--yield 30 seconds? I just want to 
point something out. I apologize, Lloyd.
    But just to make ourselves feel a little bit better about 
ourselves, everyone cites kind of Reagan, Tip O'Neill shaking 
hands, saving Social Security back in 1983. The part of the 
story, which is a wonderfully inspiring story and I appreciate 
it, the part of the story that is sometimes left out, they were 
weeks away from missing Social Security checks. That is how 
dire it was. So to a point you made maybe an hour and a half 
ago, the fact that we do have about a decade until 2033, it 
helps us in terms of the numbers right now, but given human 
nature, it actually hurts us. So as we remember fondly, the 
past, let's not forget that actually they did wait until pretty 
much the last minute before they finally acted.
    And with that, I yield back.
    Mr. Moore. I recognize the gentleman from Texas, Mr. 
Doggett.
    Mr. Doggett. Thank you very much.
    Well, I share the Chairman's concern and that of most of 
the witnesses about our soaring national debt and the need for 
this Congress to do more, to put us on a sound financial 
footing. I am a progressive Democrat. I believe we are not 
doing enough on childcare, on educational opportunity, from 
pre-K to post grad, to combating the climate crisis, to 
ensuring retirement security, and a number of--healthcare, of 
course, but all of those things cost money, and I believe in 
paying as you go, and that we cannot shift the cost of doing 
all those things onto future generations.
    I understand the skepticism that Chairman Yarmuth voices, 
and I share it based on the prior experience with these 
commissions. I think they primarily, as Senator Portman said, 
have elevated the discussion and kept the issue out there, but 
I don't see all that much accomplished from them, and I am 
certainly strongly against any commission that has as its 
primary objective to remove accountability or minimize 
accountability for Congress for cutting Medicare and Social 
Security.
    And that, of course, is against a background where the one 
time we did achieve a balanced budget and were on a path to 
significantly reduce the federal debt in the Clinton 
Administration, that didn't take a commission. It took some 
political courage and it was fairly costly to some of the 
people who had the courage to vote to help us get on a balanced 
budget path. I think that there are a number of proposals. 
Representative Peters just referenced Congressman Larson's idea 
on Social Security. I think it has some good points and some 
flaws. I have one, the President has a proposal out about the 
future of Medicare and how to finance it, but I am not sure 
there is the will in Congress to get this job done, and that is 
why I am open at least to the idea of a fiscal commission. I 
think it has to be a commission that quite clearly puts revenue 
on the table, because if revenues are not on the table, it is a 
commission to cut Social Security and Medicare, as the Ranking 
Member pointed out with some of the statements that he has 
filed and something I care about deeply.
    And I guess my question to the Senators is, is a commission 
based on your experience there with Simpson-Bowles, is it a 
mechanism--it is impossible for our Republican colleagues to 
countenance any kind of revenue increase for any purpose, it 
seems--is such a commission a place where we might find common 
ground not only at looking at areas of excessive government 
spending growth, but looking at the revenues to help us get 
true balance?
    Mr. Conrad. Can I just respond quickly, Mr. Chairman, and 
say when Simpson-Bowles went down, a group of six of us in the 
Senate, three Democrats, three Republicans, were asked by 
leadership to see if we couldn't come up with a way forward to 
adopt the principles of Simpson-Bowles and make whatever 
changes are necessary to actually be in a position to pass 
something. We worked for two years, three Democrats, three 
Republicans. At the end of that time, we put out a proposal 
that had significant revenue, it also had savings on the 
spending side.
    I was asked by President Obama and Vice President Biden to 
come up and explain to them, how did you get this kind of 
result? How did you get Republicans to agree to revenue. I 
said, you know, we spent two years going over all of the 
options and the effects on the people that we represent, and at 
the end of the day, we had some of the most conservative 
Republicans in the United States Senate agreeing to substantial 
increases in revenue. You had Democrats, some of the most 
progressive Democrats in the United States Senate, agreeing to 
savings on the spending side.
    So to me, the need for--you know, I completely agree with 
Mr. McClintock, this is a responsibility of Congress. They are 
not doing it. Let's deal with reality. They are not doing it. I 
agreed entirely with Mr. Higgins' statement about the greatness 
of America, the strengths of America. I agree with every word 
he said, but at the end of the day, we are headed for a 24 
percent cut to every Social Security beneficiary. That is what 
is going to happen. Now, we could avoid that, we could adopt 
what Chairman Yarmuth has suggested. That is a serious 
alternative, but that isn't the law. The law is everybody is 
going to get cut 24 percent. Now, when are we going to do 
something about it?
    Mr. Moore. Thank you, Mr. Doggett.
    I will briefly recognize myself again to ask a dear friend, 
de facto mentor, and former Chairman, Mr. Womack, a quick 
question, but I wanted to just highlight one thing. Folks, we 
have something good going on here right now. We have got one of 
the senior members of our side, on the Republican side, saying 
we don't need this, we have members from the Democrats side, we 
do need this. This is good. This is healthy, and I think the 
point of a catalyst, because we have watched it play out, we 
are in a different situation than we were in 1983. We are in a 
different situation, and the question, Mr. Womack--two 
questions. Mandatory spending now is representing over 70 
percent of our budget. That wasn't the case 20, 30, 40 years 
ago. It is a fundamentally different scenario that we are in 
now. This is not post World War II when we could just reduce 
defense spending and all of a sudden get our debt-to-GDP back 
on track. So just share some context with the change in where 
we are now, and then a question that I did not have prepared 
for you. I was going to talk about interest rates and stuff, 
but we have kind of covered that. Give me your sense for where 
the Republican Conference is on this right now. I have seen a 
lot of discussions on a potential of a debt commission, knowing 
it is not going to be a perfect, pristine bill that is going to 
be tough for everybody. Give me your sense. Do you feel 
something similar? Do you think that there is an urgency and a 
willingness to engage in this? And I will defer to you.
    Mr. Womack. Thanks for the question.
    Willie Sutton, the famous bank robber, when asked why he 
robbed banks, said, because that is where the money is, and 
we--as I said in my opening, we spend an enormous amount of 
time and spend a lot of political capital talking about the 
discretionary budget. Chairman presiding, Mr. Moore, you are 
correct, if you go back to 1965, discretionary spending was 
clearly the largest piece of the federal budget, 65 ish 
percent, give or take, and then now here in 2023, it is 
completely flipped, it is 70 plus percent on mandatory. So that 
should illustrate to everyone that has just basic fifth grade 
arithmetic, that if you are going to fix a $2 trillion deficit 
and indeed quit digging this hole deeper, you can't do it on 
discretionary spending. You can barely scratch the surface. The 
discretionary budget that we are debating right now is in that 
trillion and a half dollar range, and we know that the debt 
deficit this year is going to be upwards of $2 trillion. We 
know that net interest on the debt is going to be north of $650 
billion. So we are going to have to muster the courage to be 
able to deal with it.
    Now, your question about where Republicans stand on it, let 
me just cover both sides of the aisle. One side of the aisle 
would like to take the option off the table of any cuts or any 
reforms. Let me push back against that. Not necessarily any 
reforms, but any reform that is proposed, and when I did my 
Fiscal Year 2019 budget, not in this room, but in this 
Committee that balanced in a nine year window, remember the one 
thing that we did that never made it to the floor but made it 
into our budget, we just tried to do something really simple, 
and that is equalize the age of Medicare eligibility with 
Social Security. Move the retirement age from 65, the 
qualification age, from 65 to 67. You would have thought I 
canceled a day of the week.
    So my argument is, if you can't do something like that, 
then what, pray tell, can you do to fix the bigger problem? 
Then when you look to my friends in my caucus, when you start 
talking about any additional revenues, well, that is hands off. 
That is why when Senator Conrad said--and man, I totally agree, 
and look, I know when this is over and it is published that the 
next ad against me is going to be, yeah, this guy wants to 
raise your taxes. No, what I am simply saying is when you are 
this deep in the hole, you better consider every available 
option on the table or else you are never going to fix the 
problem, and that is why it is going to require the courage of 
the American people. That is why I said that we have to make 
our constituents subject matter experts, because I believe in 
my heart this, that if our constituents knew, across the 
spectrum of this great country, that this was the near-term 
biggest national security and economic challenge facing our 
country, they would step up to the plate and say, I will do my 
part. That is what Americans do. I will do my part, but they 
don't trust this Congress because we always have some way 
around it, we always have an exit ramp, we always have some 
other way of deferring the challenge.
    So again, Chairman Moore, I would tell you that if we can 
educate our constituents and make them subject matter experts, 
whether it is a commission or a Fiscal State of the Union or 
any other mechanism, then I think we would be on the road to 
solving the problem and being able to take the heat that the 
Members will fade, away, whether it is restructuring or whether 
it is revenues or any other available option.
    Sorry to belabor the point.
    Mr. Moore. Thank you, Chairman. I would like to add that 
every town hall you come to for me in my district, there is a 
five or six slide presentation that we do--it is my former 
consultant coming out--where I really do try to educate and 
make people understand why we are in the situation that we are, 
and I just avoid rhetoric and just tell people the facts, and 
when I do, they actually appreciate it. So I am trying to do my 
part, 30 to 40 person town halls at a time.
    Chair recognizes my good friend from California and son of 
the leader who last balanced our budget, part of that group 
that last balanced our budget, Mr. Jimmy Panetta.
    Mr. Panetta. Thanks, Blake. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 
Gentlemen, thank you very much for being here.
    Yeah, Chair Womack, I completely agree with you, and that 
is something that obviously that I heard plenty of times from 
that swarthy Italian that is depicted in that portrait over 
there, is that everything needs to be on the table. I 
completely agree with you.
    The problem is, and what I have seen in my limited time 
here and what I try to convince my father, is that I do believe 
it, despite some brains that are in this room. We have lost the 
art of legislating. We have not got to the point where we have 
really given that time needed to develop the policy upon which 
then we can educate the people, and that has a lot to do with 
leadership and so many other things that we can go on and on 
about, but I think that really is to our detriment, because 
when we don't have policy to rely on, then we are left with 
politics, and then we don't have that will to lean in to the 
policy and politics sort of dictates what we do.
    So that is why I am a firm believer in the fiscal 
commission. It is why I am concerned about our increasing debt 
and deficits, and I am committed to working across the aisle to 
put our country on the path of fiscal responsibility, and like 
Chairman Yarmuth said, and like many of you are stating, there 
just isn't the political will to get our fiscal house in order 
when we use regular order unfortunately. You have got Democrats 
who are opposing spending cuts, you got Republicans who are 
opposing tax increases, and we end up increasing our spending 
and passing tax cuts and ballooning our deficits. Meanwhile, we 
have a lack of action to shore up our trust funds. It means 
that we are facing steep cuts to Social Security and Medicaid 
in a decade.
    That is why I am a strong supporter of the commission. That 
is why I am proud to introduce the legislation that Scott and 
Bill put together in regards to this commission and as members 
of the Bipartisan Fiscal Forum.
    I do want to make something clear, as we heard, I do think 
everything should be on the table, and that includes revenue. 
The United States is a low tax country, ranking 32nd out of 38 
in OECD countries in terms of tax-to-GDP ratio. I just think we 
will never come to an agreement if we take one half of that 
equation, revenue, off the table.
    Now, Brian Riedl, Manhattan Institute, said something that 
I believe in, that commissions can be useful if both parties 
are truly committed to achieving an outcome rather than just 
checking the box, and I think, unfortunately, the way we 
legislate or don't legislate these days is we just check the 
box, and that is why I think we need to have this commission to 
help us get past the politics and help us actually focus on 
policies that will affect the future.
    I am out of time. I do have questions, but I will yield 
back. Thank you.
    Mr. Moore. Thank you.
    The Chair now recognizes the gentleman from Maryland, Mr. 
Trone.
    Mr. Trone. Thanks very much for this time and your efforts 
here together, and it is a really distinguished panel.
    I am probably the only business guy in the room that has 
12,000 employees and owns a $6 billion business, and I couldn't 
agree more with what Mr. Womack had to say. Everything he said, 
I agree with 100 percent, and Mr. Panetta, time to develop 
policy and not just keep developing politics. I mean, totally 
on board. We have got to look at the whole piece. I mean, the 
revenue side, I mean we have got to have that on the table. The 
C corp rate, 32, 38, I hadn't heard that stat, but we were at 
35 percent on C Corps, now we are 21, effective rate is roughly 
12 percent. The G7's effective rate is 23, yet we are only 
taxing at 12. We have given C Corps just a complete free ride. 
It is $2 trillion in ten years, $200 billion a year that we 
should have for that Child Tax Credit. That is the kind of 
thing I think we should be doing, is helping folks that are 
really struggling, children in poverty. That is where we need 
to get money to drive, but we have got to drive the revenue 
side.
    And I am going to tell you, as a business person, I don't 
make a decision on opening a new business--and I opened up my 
company, did probably 20 new businesses this year, and we will 
do 25 next year based on the tax rate. No one has ever asked 
that question. Never. We base it on our competition, can we 
beat them, and can we then create a P&L that pencils out? And 
that is how we look at it. We don't say 35 or 21. That was 
Donald Trump. He is a pathetic businessman, he is a fraud, he 
is a failure. Everybody in the business world has always known 
that, that he is a fraud and a failure, and why every developer 
I have ever met said, never do business with him. He is crazy, 
he is untrustworthy. Why would we touch him? Obviously, he 
doesn't even use American banks because no American bank, who 
have plenty of lending capacity, would lend to him. That is how 
he ended up at Deutsche Bank.
    So bottom line is we have got to look at those things, 
drive the revenue side, but John Larson's proposal, Social 
Security. I love that proposal. Good step, but we got to look 
at everything. It can't just be one side or the other side.
    But I guess I have one quick question. I got 30 seconds.
    Mr. Yarmuth, I have always loved working with you. What is 
holding us back from a serious bipartisan discussion? Is it 
special interest, the PACs, or Members afraid of a primary 
challenger? What is holding us back from talking about policy?
    Mr. Yarmuth. I think it is--as someone who, by the way, is 
one of your best customers.
    Mr. Trone. Thank you.
    Mr. Yarmuth. And founder and former co-chairman of the 
Bourbon Caucus, no, I think it is a combination of all those 
things, Mr. Trone, and I think by and large, I think Mr. Womack 
has hit it on the head, the American people just are not savvy 
enough or knowledgeable enough about budget terminology, budget 
dimensions. It is easy to say, hey, we have got $33 trillion 
worth of debt when they have a net, a family has a net worth of 
maybe $10,000, and not expect them to think that things are out 
of hand. We just don't know, and I know there are economists, 
and I am not an economist, who will say, yeah, this is out of 
hand, interest rates are going to go here, but if you look at 
the baby boomers, I am one of them, we are going to disappear 
from the scene. How does that change the long term outlook? I 
just don't think--the American people don't have enough 
information and I don't think we have enough information to 
actually accurately portray where we are, and if we can't do 
it, then the American people are not going to--they are going 
to be much more vulnerable to these rhetorical arguments and 
the exaggerations and so forth. That is, unfortunately, what 
they get now.
    And----
    Mr. Trone. Got to bring a lot more truth back to the matter 
and not a lot of such rhetoric and hyperbole.
    Mr. Yarmuth. And just let me say----
    Mr. Trone. Truth is what matters.
    Mr. Yarmuth. I totally agree with you about business people 
making decisions based on tax rates. I come from a family of 
business people. My father ran a Fortune 500 company, my 
brothers have been very successful. They have never made a 
decision based on the tax rate.
    Mr. Trone. Thank you. I yield back.
    Mr. Moore. Thank you, and given Chairman Yarmuth's 
handicap, I would have thought you would have been a golf club 
salesman, but interesting to find that out.
    The Chair now recognizes the gentleman from Virginia, Mr. 
Scott.
    Mr. Scott. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. Chairman, first of all, I want to dispel the idea that 
this is a both sides do it problem and remind people that every 
Democratic Presidential Administration since Kennedy has left 
for their Republican successors a better deficit situation than 
they inherited, without exception, and every Republican 
Administration has left for their Democratic successors a worse 
deficit situation than they inherited, without exception, and 
President Trump was on the way to fulfilling that trend before 
the pandemic. One of the reasons is that under Republicans, 
they don't pay for tax cuts, and so every time there is a tax 
cut, it just ruins their budget.
    One thing I get--I was here in 1993, Senator Conrad, you 
were here, and I think, Rob, you voted on the 1993 budget. You 
had just gotten here. It was contentious, it was down to the 
wire. Not a single Republican voted for it, and when it passed, 
it put us on a trajectory to not only balancing, but creating 
surpluses sufficient to paying off the national debt by 2008, 
putting all the money back in the trust funds by 2013. When 
they talk about the historic balanced budget agreements in the 
mid 1990s, they ignore the fact that Gingrich, when he came in 
in 1995 as Speaker, shut the government down trying to 
dismantle the budget and couldn't do it because Clinton 
wouldn't budge and the budget continued to succeed, went on to 
balance and a surplus, and if you wanted to know what the 
Republicans had in mind, we found out in 2001 when they had the 
trifecta, the House, Senate, and President, when you had 
massive tax cuts, two wars not paid for, tax cuts not paid for, 
prescription drug not paid for, and all of that budget 
projection of paying off the national debt evaporated.
    One of the reasons of the differential between Democrats 
and Republicans is unpaid for tax cuts. So I would ask 
Representative Womack if you would agree as a condition of 
starting the commission, an agreement that we would go to PAYGO 
for tax cuts.
    Mr. Womack. I believe in any mechanism that can be enforced 
without Congress deciding that we are not going to enforce it, 
and I think we can go back to PAYGO and we can have a long 
conversation about whether PAYGO was actually enforced.
    Mr. Scott. Let me just say--reclaiming my time--under the 
Democrats, we pay for new spending and we pay for tax cuts. 
Under Republican rule, you pay for new spending, but you do not 
have to pay for tax cuts.
    Mr. Womack. Well, I mean, I would agree that, principally 
if you are going to have any impact on the budget in a negative 
way, that you need to have a mechanism in place that either 
provides an offset that you will honor----
    Mr. Scott. Well, I am talking about starting a commission. 
I have no time left, so let me just pose some questions. If you 
all want to answer them, fine, but I think they just ought to 
be posed anyway.
    The Ranking Member pointed out that the public, given the 
choice of taxing people over the present limit of $160,000 on 
Social Security, would rather do that than suffer benefit cuts. 
On commission, one of the problems with the commission might be 
that dealing with short-term budget problems, how do you deal 
with long-term problems like climate change, investments we 
need to be making? How would they be? They would not be well 
reflected, and a concern that there is a difference between 
talking about doing something and actually doing something. The 
commission may give the many people an opportunity to pretend 
that they are doing something and delay the inevitable. We have 
tough choices to make, we just need to make them.
    And with that, if anybody wants to comment, otherwise I 
yield back.
    Mr. Moore. Sir, for you, Senator.
    Mr. Conrad. Just very briefly, I would say this to the 
Congressman, who I enjoyed working with very much back in the 
day. It just strikes me that we have got an opportunity to take 
this on in a structure that gets both people at the table 
focusing on the issues, whether it is climate, whether it is 
revenue, whether it is spending, that you have an opportunity 
to be at the table to have these serious discussions. We all 
know the way the budget process works now, you really don't 
have that opportunity. We are both locked into a partisan 
struggle that avoids the real tough discussions that we need to 
have, and will it work? I have no idea. The one thing I know 
for sure is that what is happening now is not working, and it 
strikes me that let's have an opportunity to try something 
else, let's have an opportunity to try something different. 
That is what I would say to the gentleman.
    Mr. Womack. Mr. Chairman and Mr. Scott, two points I want 
to make. This is going back to the Joint Select Committee on 
Budget Process Reform. We went into the process reform process 
recognizing that it was a process, it was designed to change 
the process. It was not based on developing some kind of 
outcome, i.e., what we are going to do at the end of this thing 
is going to create some outcome. What we wanted was to improve 
the process, and the process involved a number of things that 
are included in my testimony this morning.
    The other thing that we were able to put in this package 
was realizing that a balanced budget amendment is problematic 
for the Congress for a lot of reasons, that we installed a 
debt-to-GDP target, which we thought would be very important, 
debt-to-GDP, meaning that in these larger policy discussions, 
climate change, et al, you look at those policies in terms of 
what is it going to do to the economic condition of the country 
if you do it or don't do it, and does it fit within the debt-
to-GDP range so that we could start to encourage--you know, Mr. 
Yarmuth talked about how you either cut spending or you raise 
taxes. Well, actually, there is a third option out there, grow 
your economy, and that is what happens when you have the larger 
policy discussion. So debt-to-GDP became our metric to use, and 
by the way, that was a Sheldon Whitehouse recommendation.
    So I think if we could get back to the inconvenient truths 
of where we stand and make our constituents subject matter 
experts, it makes it a lot easier for us to enact meaningful 
legislation.
    Mr. Portman. Chairman, just briefly, and, Bobby, we worked 
together closely when I was in the House and also in the 
Senate. I have always enjoyed working with you.
    And reflecting on your comments and Mr. Peter's comments, 
Mr. Panetta's comments, Mr. Trone's comments, this is about 
finding common ground. That is what we have lost, that art, the 
art of the deal that was talked about earlier, and if you have 
an objective that everybody agrees to, which you get out of a 
commission, you have to sign up to an objective--I mentioned 
earlier there needs to be some fiscal metric. That may be the 
hardest thing this commission has to do. Once you agree to that 
and everybody is on board--and this requires the leaders of 
Congress, Republicans and Democrats, to put the right people on 
this commission who actually want to get to an answer because 
it is too easy not to get to an answer around here and be 
benefited by it politically. Whether it is the way the media 
treats you, because you can get on Meet the Press if you are 
going to be out there rabblerousing, you can raise more money 
online the way the political system is working in terms of our 
primaries. We have got to get back to a system where we are 
serving the people, and that means agreeing on that objective. 
I think the commission is a vehicle to do that. Kind of along 
the lines of what my friend Kent Conrad just said. It will 
require this serious discussion, it will force the Congress to 
deal with these issues rather than talking past each other, 
which is, in my experience, what is happening more and more 
over the past 30 years I have been in public service.
    So I sense you have an open mind, my friend. I hope you do, 
because I think this could be very important.
    Mr. Scott. I posed the question--I did want to make a quick 
comment about the balanced budget amendment. I think we ought 
to discuss whether that process would actually make it easier 
or harder to actually balance the budget.
    My view is the parameters of the balanced budget amendment 
would make it virtually impossible to ever get control of the 
budget.
    Thank you, Mr. Chair.
    Mr. Moore. And from that exact point, I will just highlight 
what Chairman Womack said. I mean he focused on debt-to-GDP. If 
we could make the focus on debt-to-GDP, we could actually have 
substantial ground that we could gain in this direction. If we 
make it--you know, we even did--I mean we--there are some in 
this Committee that don't feel comfortable waiting for ten 
years to get to a balanced budget. What we put the marker on, 
it is very difficult, ten years. I mean, goodness, that is so 
far away for a lot of people. If we could get to a point where 
we were talking debt-to-GDP and putting those markers in place 
and establishing the guardrails so we could make that case, I 
think that is in addition to this piece.
    Using my newfound power as Chair, I want to just make one 
quick comment to your first point. I have numerous times 
acknowledged that President Clinton was a key aspect, 
particularly with Mr. Panetta, a good friend, of finding a way 
to get to that balanced budget when a Democrat lead, but we 
cannot also dismiss the fact that oftentimes when there is a 
Democrat that takes the White House, what follows is a 
Republican Congress, and that friction also creates good 
outcomes for us to be able to make movements here, and so that 
happens--and then it moves the other way when there is a 
Republican, and so to say that Republican Presidents haven't 
cared about this, I don't think is fully accurate, and I am 
willing to address it on both sides.
    The point I would like to quickly make, what we have gotten 
to the point, where we have gotten in Congress, is this once in 
a generation type of legislating that happens when you have the 
trifecta. When you have the White House, House, and Senate in 
one party, we have this knee jerk reaction to go big, and that 
is not ultimately the best 2030 long term approach to 
legislating. So 2017, I think the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act did an 
exceptional job of growing the economy, but we didn't take much 
advantage of finding areas to reduce our spending, and that is 
a criticism I have of our own party, and the 2021 experience 
that I had when the trifecta existed in the Democrat Party, we 
had a $1.9 trillion bill in ARPA with no offset spending that--
whether you blame it on inflation, all on that, I don't. I said 
there is a lot of factors that contributed to it, but I agree 
with Larry Summers when he said this was a huge contributor to 
our inflation.
    So we get into these modes of, we have to go big now 
because we have the trifecta, we got White House, House, and 
Senate, and we can bypass the filibuster, so we got to go big. 
Instead, we are trying to do the opposite here and make 
something 30 years out.
    I have four kids, ten and under. That is all I care about. 
I care what they are going to be doing. If they are sending a 
dollar of tax and 50 cents of it goes to paying the interest 
when they get their first job, I will have failed my job right 
now, and I don't want to fail this job.
    So I just like to add some context there that we have these 
moments in split government to actually make some progress 
here.
    So thank you.
    With that, I appreciate the latitude that I gave myself, 
apparently.
    To yield now to Mr. Espaillat, the gentleman from New York 
to recognize him.
    Mr. Espaillat. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Budgets are political documents. They pretty much state 
what our values are, what do we believe in, how do we look at 
the state of the economy in America. Budgets have a heartbeat, 
they have a pulse, and part of the problem in developing a fair 
and transparent budget that reflects the condition of America, 
hunger in America, people's inability to pay rent in America, 
the struggles of working families in America, is the fact that 
many of my colleagues in Congress are millionaires, and so as a 
result, they are unable to penetrate and reach out of the 
bubble and see what the American people are going through on a 
daily basis.
    And so, for example, the Child Tax Credit program was 
referred to here as an entitlement. $2,000 for a 17 year old or 
under, that results to $166.66 a month for a mom. Is that going 
to break our back? That is something that we cannot do for 
somebody that maybe is on a hunger line trying to feed their 
families? The Earned Income Tax Credit for poor families that 
are making under $59,000 a year, just a little push so they 
could maybe buy Pampers, milk, and maybe be able not to fall 
back on their rent, is that going to break our backs? And so we 
propose a commission here. Some folk call that the paralysis of 
analysis. America is smart. They read through stuff. You know 
what they say out there, those that cannot go outside of the 
bubble because they just have so much money in their bank 
accounts that they don't have a clear vision. You want to kill 
a good idea? Build a commission. You want to stop 
innovativeness? Give it to a task force. You want to have deep 
cuts that cut to the bone like they try to do this year? Study 
it, create a study group.
    This year we had an agreement between the leader of our 
House and the President. Some of us felt that they usurped 
appropriators like myself that Constitutionally have the power 
of the purse, and that wasn't enough. They broke the agreement 
and they came here and they wanted to cut it to the bone. That 
mom that wants $166.66 per month through a Child Tax Credit, 
they wanted to cut what some of you call entitlements to the 
bones.
    Now, revenue. Revenue is at the center of this because the 
Trump tax cut benefited the very wealthy, the very rich, not 
the police officer, not the teacher, not the civil servant, the 
very rich. That is an entitlement, a corporate entitlement, and 
that is right at the core and it is not talked about, debt and 
deficit.
    So, Mr. Yarmuth, thank you for still having a failed grade 
in your lapel, and I want to hear from you, if you may, what is 
the role of these Trump tax cuts for the very rich in the 
current fiscal condition facing the Nation?
    Mr. Yarmuth. Talking about tax cuts--thank you, Mr. 
Espaillat, for that question.
    I go back to my brother who has been very successful in 
business and always voted Republican because he wanted to pay 
less tax. Well, back in 2008, he called me and he said, John, 
you will be happy to know that Judy, his wife, Judy and I are 
maxing out to Barack Obama and we are voting for all Democrats 
this year, and I said, that is great, Bob, what was your 
epiphany? And he said I finally--he is in the barbecue 
business, barbecue restaurants--he said I finally figured out 
that if nobody can afford barbecue, it doesn't matter what my 
tax rate is.
    And I think in terms of Chairman Moore's comment about 
debt-to-GDP ratio, there are an awful lot of economists now who 
say that is not a meaningful ratio, it doesn't really reflect 
the sustainability or indicate the sustainability of our debt. 
So my fear about a commission is, yes, you could take the 
position that there is no harm in doing a commission, it does 
promote conversations, but there is some danger with a 
commission that makes recommendations that fail because then 
the commission has failed, Congress has failed once again.
    So if you said we are going to do a commission which 
actually analyzes the question of debt sustainability and 
doesn't get into recommendations for cuts or increases and so 
forth and really provides some education as opposed to 
suggestions, I might be much more inclined to accept that, 
because I think that would be a valuable thing for the country 
to have. Exactly what is the impact of our debt? Does it 
matter? How much can we live with? But again, if you are going 
to get into recommendations that ultimately are going to prove 
very difficult politically, then I think there is a real risk 
in doing the commission and that is why I am concerned about 
it.
    Mr. Moore. And that is why I love that there are so many 
economists out there because I oftentimes love to disagree with 
them, and I will vehemently disagree the debt-to-GDP isn't a 
strong indicator of what we need to continue on, and to just 
make the point as I move to our last questions here, the Tax 
Cut and Jobs Act was actually the--it doubled our Child Tax 
Credit. So we have to recognize as making that point, the Child 
Tax Credit was doubled under the TCJA, right? So this is 
something that gets blamed in saying it was only for the rich 
when it targeted the middle class and making sure with the 
standard deduction as well. That is just facts that there was 
there, and I get it. Like I have said, I have criticized 
everybody in the last 20 years and that everybody falls into 
that, but I do think that is an important point to make, and 
moving on to our final speaker, and I think folks, and if we 
have to--Mr. Yakym from Indiana is now recognized, and someone 
that has been an absolute breath of fresh air just a month or 
two behind me on this and part of this group that really wants 
to tackle this issue. So thank you and you will be our final 
questions today.
    Mr. Yakym. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    I ask unanimous consent to submit a Washington Post article 
by George F. Will into the record.
    Mr. Moore. Without objection, so ordered.
    [The information follows:]

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    Mr. Yakym. Thank you to our witnesses for being here today. 
To both of our former U.S. Senators, to our current Member, who 
happens to be my assigned mentor in Congress, Mr. Womack. I 
could not have asked for a better one. Thank you, and to our 
former Member as well. I also have a few of my constituents who 
are here. Thanks for being here today.
    Our Federal debt currently stands at over $33.5 trillion 
dollars. That equates to a debt-to-GDP ratio of 124 percent. No 
one can look at these numbers and believe that the Fiscal State 
of our Nation is sound. These spending habits have led to 
serious economic problems, including inflation at a 40 year 
high under the Biden Administration. This has made it much 
harder for the Hoosiers that I represent and for all Americans 
to provide for their families and plan for the future.
    Like many of us, I came to Washington to help build a 
better future for my constituents, but passing policies that 
consistently increase government spending is not building a 
better future. I fully support establishing a fiscal 
commission, but we need to carefully design it so that we don't 
actually do nothing, but we actually change this Nation in the 
course of our fiscal stability.
    The last thing we need is another report outlining the 
problem while failing to make any tangible changes. We know 
what the problem is: the Federal Government spends too much 
money without regard to our national debt. Our fiscal house is 
not in order, and at a time of nearly $2 trillion in annual 
deficits, it is continuing to get worse. We need to restore 
fiscal responsibility immediately.
    Each of you served on one of the previous commissions aimed 
at taking control of our spending and restoring fiscal 
responsibility. My question is this, in your experience, what 
were the biggest hurdles that you faced in implementing the 
recommendations of previous commissions, and what would you 
recommend that we do differently to ensure that the 
commission's recommendations actually become law?
    I would like to start with my House mentor, Mr. Womack.
    Mr. Womack. Well, you raise a good question, and as I have 
said a couple of times in my testimony here today, the 
challenge with Congress is that we create commissions and we 
create task forces and we look at problem sets, and we develop 
potential solutions, and then there is no real mechanism to 
give them the force of law, and so as a result of those, we 
look at them, they become shiny objects, and we acknowledge and 
brag about our great work, and it goes into our resume, but it 
never becomes the law of the land, and so there has to be some 
mechanism in place that gives it the force of law.
    Congress just has too many areas, and we defer, defer, 
defer. We defer past milestones, we defer past holidays, we 
defer past elections. We defer, defer, defer, and it makes it 
easy. They call it kicking the can down the road. It makes it 
really easy to move it to the next milestone. Right now, we are 
on a continuing resolution till November the 17th. That is the 
next milestone, and we will do something that will move us past 
that milestone, and then the next milestone is going to be the 
holidays, and then the next milestone is going to probably be 
the 2024 election, and so we just have to have some ability to 
be able to constrain Congress from moving past the moment to 
some future milestone and give it the force of law today.
    So if that can be accomplished, then I think we are well on 
our way to solving for the crisis.
    Now, the other thing I will say and then I will finish, and 
that is so much of what we are talking about today becomes what 
I call an inconvenient truth, and the American public just--we 
are afraid to tell the American public the inconvenient truth 
because if you tell them what the problem is, they are going to 
want to know what the solution is, and as soon as you advocate 
for a solution, that trial balloon gets shot down before it 
gets six inches off the ground, and then you become a marked 
target.
    So those are the issues that we have to settle within 
ourselves, both sides of the aisle, and give us an opportunity 
to put this issue behind us because it is a growing threat to 
our country.
    Mr. Yakym. Thank you, Congressman Womack, and Senator 
Portman, same question. What would you recommend that we do 
differently to ensure that the next commission that is set up 
actually makes recommendations that become law?
    Mr. Portman. Good question. By the way, I appreciate your 
comments on not just laying out a problem, but actually coming 
up with a solution.
    The problem is pretty easy to describe, and everybody on 
both sides of the aisle is kind of railed on the problem from a 
different perspective, but the question is, how do you 
actually, again, come up with a metric that makes sense, 
whether it is a ten year balanced budget, whether it is debt-
to-GDP, and then have the objective of everybody there on that 
commission dedicated to trying to get there, to find that 
common ground. If you don't have that, it is not going to work. 
So I think that is maybe the most important thing.
    Second, I will say just to the comment that some of these 
commissions or groups don't end up getting passed, again, 60 
percent of Simpson-Bowles ended up getting passed by roughly 
2015. I was on this Super Committee. I said it wasn't too 
super. Almost all of our suggestions ended up getting 
incorporated over time. It is amazing because Members of 
Congress were desperate to find some proposals and, well, the 
Super Committee looked at this even though the Super Committee 
itself failed to get a majority vote, the ideas and the 
research that was done was very helpful, and then finally, as 
we talked earlier, just raising the visibility of this issue, 
forcing Congress to deal with it, but I would say to answer 
your question more directly, the other most important aspect, 
other than having this objective, having the commitment to find 
that common ground, would be having an up or down vote. So I 
think you have got to have the ability to have an expedited 
procedure in the United States Senate and then to have a vote. 
As you know, the Senate is a tougher body to deal with, with 
regard to the rules than in the House, not just the 60 votes, 
but the fact that things can get hung up. So you have to have 
an expedited procedure and eventually force a vote, force the 
ability of this Congress to come together and make a tough 
vote, tough decisions. I said earlier, I think what the 
commission gives you is hopefully trust, it builds trust by 
choosing the right people and the right experts and just being 
straight like you are in Indiana and the Midwest and just 
telling people this is what it is about.
    Second is I do think it provides some knowledge, 
information that maybe not everybody has, because you will have 
people who are really targeted and focused on this issue, and I 
think Mr. Yarmuth and others have talked about that, that would 
be a good thing about it, and then third, you know, if you have 
a commission that is going to report, it does provide a little 
political cover, and people say, well, maybe we don't need 
political cover in here. Well, obviously we do, because nothing 
else has worked, and the cover is, hey, is this imperfect? Not 
what I would have done exactly, but on the other hand, $33 
trillion, your four boys, your kids and grandkids. I mean, this 
is something that we have to suck it up and do the right thing 
for the country.
    So I think those are the ingredients for success.
    Mr. Yakym. Thank you, Senator Portman, and Mr. Chairman, 
thank you for chairing this Committee hearing today on the 
biggest domestic----
    Mr. Womack. Mr. Yakym, could I interject one thing?
    Mr. Yakym. Please.
    Mr. Womack. This whole discussion about the budget process, 
this whole discussion about the debt commission, this whole 
discussion about the fiscal condition of our country, and back 
to your question about what we can do to put some teeth into it 
and to constrain Congress. It reminds me of the cab drive I had 
in Cairo, Egypt, when I was deployed back in 2002, right after 
9-11. We were driving down the road in the cab and it is all 
over the road, and it is a three wide lane and there is four 
wide traffic, and I asked the cab driver, I said, hey, man, do 
you not see the lines in the road? And he looked at me and he 
said, those are merely a suggestion, and that is exactly how I 
would describe the process that the U.S. Congress uses to 
manage its budgets and precisely why we are in the condition we 
are in.
    I yield back.
    Mr. Yakym. I could not agree more, and thank you, 
Congressman Womack.
    Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
    Mr. Moore. And I couldn't come up with better comments to 
end on than all of that. Very clear statements about the need 
for this and putting it into perspective.
    So thank you all. Thank you, Senators Portman and Conrad 
and Chairmen Womack and Yarmuth, all dedicated public servants 
and willing to have made a mark on this place and continuing to 
do so. So thank you all very much.
    Please be advised that Members may submit written questions 
to be answered later in writing. Those questions and your 
answers will be made part of the formal hearing record. Any 
Members who wish to submit questions for the record may do so 
within seven days, and with that, the Committee stands 
adjourned.
    [Whereupon, at 2:58 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.]

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