Thursday, June 17, 2010

U.S. Senator Johnny Isakson (R-GA)
Floor Statement on the Federal Debt
Remarks as Delivered on the Senate Floor

Madam President, I thank the Senator from Oklahoma for yielding. I will be brief.

But I spend a lot of time, as all of us do, listening to the speeches of our colleagues. I spend a lot of time thinking about what they say. I was compelled to come to the floor, as I heard the opening remarks by the Senator from Oklahoma, to tell a little story.

Talking about grandchildren, my wife and I are blessed. We have nine of them. This past Tuesday, June 15, was our 42nd wedding anniversary. Really, the rest of my life is about those grandchildren, to whatever extent I can do it, either as a grandfather or a legislator, trying to make sure we leave them a life that at least has the hope of opportunity as great as was left to all of us by the generations who preceded us.

A few weeks ago, in Albany, GA--actually a few months ago--I was making a speech, as all of us do, and used ``a trillion'' as easily as all of us do in our speeches. After my speech, I opened the floor for questions, and a gentleman at the back of the room said: I just can't quite get my hands on how much a trillion really is. Can you explain it?

I was up there doing the best I could. I got the number of zeroes past a billion, and all this. But I could not quantify it to magnify the gravity of what that number means.

So when I got home that night, my wife of 42 years suggested: Why don't you just figure out how many years have to go by for a trillion seconds to pass? I said: You know, that is a good idea. Everybody would understand that.

So I got the calculator out and multiplied 60 times 60 to get how many seconds are in an hour, 3,600; multiplied that by 24 to get how many seconds are in a day; multiplied that by 365 to get how many seconds are in a year. Then I divided that into 1 trillion. The answer is it would take 31,709 years for 1 trillion seconds to go by.

Thursday, 2 weeks ago, our debt went above $13 trillion. So you can take that and multiply 13 times 31,709 and see how big that obligation is. If you spread it over a lot of people, you can reduce the number down to an amount that does not seem as big, but we are one country. It is our debt. To pay it off we do one of either three things: We inflate the dollar to a value that is so cheap that what everybody has is worthless, and you pay off the debt with cheap dollars, but you destroy your country or you can just look the other way and say: Well, maybe nobody else will care. Maybe they will still buy our debt. We are going to keep spending, which is kind of what appears to be happening now or you can do what American families have been doing all their lives, but in particular the last 18 to 24 months: you sit around the kitchen table--and in this case we sit around the conference table--and you start setting your priorities to live within your means.

I just want to commend the Senator from Oklahoma because his examples about accountability for expenditures, doing away with redundancy and all those things--yes, that is hard to do, and, yes, it is tedious to do, and, yes, it is more fun to talk about other things, but that is what Americans are having to do, and they are having to do it big time right now.

So I just could not help but come to the floor, having just celebrated my 42nd wedding anniversary. Well, I did not get to celebrate it because I was here and she was in Marietta, but we are going to celebrate it this weekend. Thinking about my nine grandchildren and thinking about the challenges of the debt that is rising and the increase that is just in this bill alone--as well as some of the pay-fors in this bill, which actually are going to stunt growth even worse, like carried interest--I thought I would just come and commend the Senator from Oklahoma on being right on point.

We all might have different opinions of what ought to be cut and what ought to be moved and what ought to be removed from being redundant, but we ought to be at the table figuring out what those should be, making agreements we can live with, and making the future for our grandchildren at least as bright, as prosperous, and as free as the one our parents left to us.