mr. chairman , i thank my friend from south carolina for yielding me this time , and i also want to thank him and commend him for the leadership that he has shown during the course of the budget committee work and for the alternative democratic substitute which we will talk about a little bit later today .  mr. chairman , there are few moments during the legislative year here in congress which really defines who we are as a congress , who we are as a nation and where we are going with our priorities .  it is one of these moments today when we have a discussion about our budgets and the priorities that we place in the budget .  for some reason , the republican budget that we have before us only is budgeted for 5 years rather than the typical 10 years .  i submit that one of the reasons i think they are doing a 5-year budget instead of a 10-year budget is because of the complete breakdown in fiscal responsibility and what the costs of their budget will entail and the explosion of budget deficits in the second 5 years that they do not want to talk about during the course of these next couple of days during the budget .  we , on the other hand , will be presenting a democratic alternative , one that does , i believe , reflect the values and the priorities that we share as americans in this nation .  our budget will reinstate the pay-as-you-go rules to instill budget discipline again in the decisions that we are making in these budgets .  we achieve a balanced budget under our plan by 2012 , just when the massive baby boom retirement wave really starts to hit , and we protect important investments , in defense , in veterans ' programs , education and health care to keep america strong and to help us grow the economy and create jobs .  by reinstating the pay-as-you-go rules , we will be in a better fiscal position to better preserve and protect the long-term solvency of the social security program .  what this chart demonstrates next to me is the result of budget decisions over the last 14 to 15 years .  this green line which shows an upward trend that resulted in 4 consecutive years of budget surpluses is congress operating under pay-as-you-go rules .  the red lines that show the plummeting of the surpluses into historically large budget deficits shows congress without pay-as-you-go rules .  what is hard to understand about reinstituting pay-as-you-go rules as part of budget discipline and decisions that we have to make to right the fiscal ship again ?  with pay-as-you-go rules , it gave us 4 years of budget surpluses , 2 in which the congress was not raiding the social security trust fund and using that money for large tax cuts or other spending priorities and enabled us to start reducing the national debt which was an incredible economic dynamic at the end of the 1990s .  this chart demonstrates the current raid on the social security trust fund under the bush administration .  every dime in surplus that is being run in the social security account right now is being diverted , to help finance large cuts for the most wealthy or to help finance large new spending programs , a 30 percent increase in federal spending over the last few years alone .  that will continue throughout the duration when we are running surpluses in the social security trust fund under their budget proposal .  what this has meant was increased borrowing cost , year after year after year having to raise the debt ceiling in order to finance the breakdown in fiscal discipline in this place .  why is this important today ?  it is important because we do not owe this debt to ourselves anymore .  ninety percent of the new debt that was purchased this last year alone is being purchased by foreign countries , japan , the number one purchaser , soon to be surpassed by china as the number one holder of our debt .  i do not believe , and democrats do not believe , it is in our best long-term economic interest to be so dependent on foreign interests to be financing these deficits .  the president has been out campaigning on a new social security plan lately .  it is kind of tough to engage in a meaningful discussion since he has not offered a detailed proposal ; but from what we understand , he is calling for massive new borrowing in order to set up these privatized accounts that he is fond of .  in fact , social security runs a deficit of $ 3.7 trillion over the next 75 years .  what the president is proposing to do is to borrow $ 5 trillion for these transition costs to set up private accounts over the first 20 years alone in order to fix a $ 3.7 trillion problem .  and that is probably one of the reasons why he is having such a hard time selling his plan out in middle america .  people know intuitively with this massive new borrowing that it is going to hurt economic growth prospects for our nation ; it is going to jeopardize 