WASHINGTON – Speaking on the Senate floor today for the first time since the November 2nd election, U.S. Senator John Kerry challenged Washington to face up to the nation’s skyrocketing debt and urged his colleagues not to rubberstamp yet another $690 billion increase in the nation’s borrowing limit. Kerry – who broke with his party’s leadership to support deficit reduction legislation nearly 20 years ago and who helped lead efforts in the 1990s to balance the federal budget – criticized the “borrow-and-spend” policies that have taken the United States from an all-time record surplus to an all-time record debt over the past four years. “The United States is operating a borrow-and-spend government continuously stretched by demands for more tax cuts and more spending. And when they don’t have the money to pay for their choices, they just put the tab on the national credit card and send the bill to our kids. It is an economic policy of borrow and spend – and it cannot be sustained.”

Senator Kerry’s remarks came during debate over raising the debt limit, the maximum amount the United States is allowed by law to borrow. Congress raised the debt limit amount last year, but since then, the government has accumulated more debt than all the presidents from Washington to Reagan combined.

“We don’t have a minute to wait before we start to deal honestly and candidly with our national debt. We have a responsibility to restore fiscal responsibility rather than merely voting again to raise the nation’s debt limit.”

If the new debt limit passes Congress this week, the government will have added $2.1 trillion to the debt limit in less than four years. This is more than $7,200 for every man, woman and child in the United States, and a child born today will enter the world owing more than $17,000 when all our past and expected debt is totaled.

“Americans understand how to balance their family budget – they sit down at their kitchen tables and play by the rules every day. We used to know how to do that – Washington dug a hole of deficits and debt in the 1980s, we made the tough choices to dig ourselves out of it in the 1990s, and now here we are, back again with a new hole worse than ever before. Neither Congress nor the Administration has been willing to face up to that reality – even as the consequences stare us in the face.”

Senator Kerry will vote against increasing the debt limit when it comes to a vote in the Senate. He noted the problems with raising the debt limit, including that 42 percent of America’s debt is now held by foreign nations. China alone holds $172 billion in U.S. debt.

“We can argue over who was the cause of this problem – who exactly made borrow-and-spend economics the policy of our nation. And I have very strong feeling about that. Or, we can try to be part of the solution. We can work for economic policies that create opportunity and demand responsibility.”

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