mr. speaker , in 1997 , jennifer dunn , a republican from washington , and i started this debate on the estate tax .  at that time the country was in much different shape financially than it is today .  at that time , we raised the issue for estate tax relief because i thought then it was punitive .  it had nothing to do with the theory that the gentleman from massachusetts ( mr. neal )  spoke so eloquently about , and that is to keep 3 percent or 1 percent of the people from owning 99 percent of our country .  we did not want to be like england where whoever got control of the land and money , and 1 , 450 still had it 26 generations later and people who were hardworking could not break through that ceiling because of the nobility that was enshrined in their tax code .  that is why we have an estate tax .  but we raised that issue , and i voted for the bill that is being proposed today , but i can no longer vote for it .  let me tell you why .  it is because , as i look in the faces of these young people , you are looking at a house , a senate and an administration that has embarked since 2001 on the most radical , irresponsible financial riverboat gamble that this country has ever seen .  there has been no political american leadership that has ever done what this group of people who currently hold the power of government here in washington have done to this country .  since april of 2001 , in your name and mine , this government has borrowed $ 1.2 trillion in hard money .  what that means to us is that we have transferred , at only 4 percent interest , $ 50 billion a year from programs like social security , like health care , like armor for our troops , from veterans , to health care , to education , all the things that will give the citizens of this country a chance , an opportunity to be whatever it is their god-given talents give them , we have transferred $ 50 billion a year from that to interest .  and you know what is worse ?  eighty-four percent of this $ 1.2 trillion has been borrowed from overseas .  we are now sending more money overseas .  eighty-four percent of this interest check is going overseas .  let me tell you something scary .  a former official of the people 's bank of china , the country 's central bank and now an economist in hong kong , was recently quoted as saying that the u.s. dollar is now at the mercy of asian governments .  do you know what we are doing ?  we are mortgaging our country to foreign interests who do not see the world as we see it .  it has got to stop , and it has got to stop sometime , and i for one am saying i want to stop it now .  in your name , we are borrowing at the rate of $ 13 , 300 a second .  this is staggering , mind numbing .  $ 48 million an hour .  since this debate started , in our names we have borrowed $ 48 million and given the bill to those little children sitting up there .  $ 1 billion a day .  do you know how much $ 1 billion is ?  if you take thousand-dollar bills and stack them up like that , to get to a million dollars it is a foot high ; to get to a billion dollars , it is as high as the empire state building ; and to get to a trillion dollars , which is what has been borrowed in the last 46 months in your name , it is a thousand times as high as the empire state building , one thousand dollar bills like this .  we are facing a financial armageddon .  what we have done has created a financial vulnerability vis-a-vis the rest of world that is every bit as big a security interest as anything else we are going to face in the future .  i just hope that someday soon that some sense will come to this place about how we are handling or mishandling your money .  