Address at the 2011 National Conservative Student Conference ––––––––––––––————––––——–—––––––––––––––––– Senator Marco Rubio –––––––––––––––––—————————––––––––––––––––
Senator Rubio headlines the Foundation’s Reagan 100 banquet during the annual student summer conference in our nation’s capital.
way, that is at the core of everything that’s debated here in Washington, D.C. I am sure you all watched this debt limit debate. But the debt limit debate was not about the debt limit. The debt limit debate was, at its core, about what the country wants moving forward. The facts are indisputable. The United States government spends $300 billion a month, and $180 billion of that comes from money we collect from taxes and fees. The rest, $120 billion or so every month, comes from money that we borrow. That ratio is unsustainable, but it is only destined to get worse. You see, our spending is going to go up dramatically because we have made promises. This government and the leaders that were here before have made promises that are going to increase spending—Medicare balloons, Social Security balloons.
In addition, revenue cannot keep pace, and our economy has flat-lined. It literally did not grow [during the second quarter of 2011]. It did not grow. Unemployment hovers at nine-something percent, but the real unemployment figure—when you add in people that are underemployed and those who have just stopped looking for jobs—is close to 20 percent. One out of five Americans is underemployed or has simply given up, and that means that that revenue number, as a percentage of how much we spend, is only going to get worse….The spending is going to balloon, and the revenue is going to stay stagnant. In addition, the $120 billion that we borrow each month is completely unsustainable. If we keep doing what we are doing, and if nothing changes, we will have a debt crisis that will make the last one look like child’s play. This last debt Young America’s Foundation | Libertas | Winter 2012
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