Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, today we passed the largest spending bill in the history of the United States. When you add the interest and everything into it, it is going to cost over $1 trillion. I don't think the American people really understand how much $1 trillion is, but it is an awful lot of money.
I want to congratulate my Democrat colleagues on getting this passed. I certainly did not vote for this bill. I think it is going to be very detrimental to the future economy of these United States, and I think it is going to hurt our economy instead of creating the jobs that it was intended to create. So I think we made a big mistake today, but the Democrats got their bill passed, and they're going to get it passed in the Senate. It is going to become law, and every American is going to have to live with it.
One of the things that concerns me is not only the $1 trillion we have spent today but that Mr. Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury, said the other day that we would have to spend another $1 trillion, $2 trillion or maybe even more to help the financial institutions of this country stay afloat. So we're looking at $2-, $3-, $4-, maybe $5 trillion.
If you will look at this chart, Mr. Speaker, it shows the amount of money that is in circulation. You will see it was pretty consistent at around $1 trillion-plus over the last couple of decades. Then just recently, it shot up like a rocket, and that was before all of this spending that we put through the House today or the amount of money that Mr. Geithner is going to spend. So we are looking at a tremendous increase in the amount of money that is going to be in circulation.
Now, one of the things that helps stave off this inflationary problem is that we have people around the world, other countries, that loan us money. For instance, China right now has loaned us $682 billion. That is what we owe them. We owe Japan $577 billion. We owe the United Kingdom $360 billion. We owe Brazil $120 billion to $130 billion.
China said just the other day that they were very concerned about loaning us money because they said that they did not think that the currency in the United States would be stable, so the value of their currency would go down. They were calling Mr. Geithner, Secretary Geithner, to say, ``Hey, we want some stability here because the value of the currency in our country is going to be depreciated because of what you're doing.''
Well, a day later, after it was brought up on this floor, they changed their minds and said, ``Well, the only place to loan this money where we have any kind of security is the United States. We are going to continue to loan money.'' So they are going to loan money to us in the billions and in the trillions of dollars, but the kicker is: How much is the interest going to be that they're going to charge? Because that interest is added to the loan that they are giving us on a month-to-month basis. I believe they kicked that interest rate up, so we are going to see an inflationary trend not only in the money they are loaning to us but in the interest that is going to be accumulating.
I know this is an awful lot for my colleagues to digest and for the people across this country who might be paying attention to digest, but let me just say this, Mr. Speaker: It is going to cause an inflationary trend at some point in the future. I think it is going to be earlier rather than later. When that inflationary trend starts, this chart is going to be minuscule to what we are going to see. We are going to see inflation shoot up at a very rapid rate, which means that the value of the dollar that every American has in their bank or in their home is going to be devalued.
That means, if you buy a car for $30,000, it may cost $60,000 or $90,000. If you buy a loaf of bread, it may cost 2 or 3 times as much or more. That is called hyperinflation. This happened back in the 1970s when we had a very similar situation to what we have today. We had double-digit inflation, double-digit unemployment, and they raised the interest rates to 21 percent to stop all of this. That may happen again. If it does, it will put a real hammer on the economy, and it will put more and more and more, thousands and millions of people out of work.
But the problem early on is the inflation that we are going to have to deal with. This is a problem that is very real, and I hope my Democrat colleagues will think ahead and will realize that we have to do something to stifle the growth in government and the spending because we are not going to be able to deal with this inflation as we should, and our kids and our grandkids and the future generations of this country are going to have to pay, not only with inflation, but with higher taxes and with a lower quality of life. That is something we should not have to deal with, Mr. Speaker. END
