It is a pleasure and an honor to be addressing a group from the Young America’s Foundation. I am in a big fan of this foundation. I am a huge fan of Ronald Reagan and have been almost my entire life.

My life changed when I was about 10-years old. My dad was hired by Ronald Reagan to be his Solicitor General. That is a government official within the U.S. Department of Justice that represents the U.S. Government before the Supreme Court of the United States.

I became a huge Ronald Reagan fan before he even hired my dad. I think that was when I truly discovered my Republicanness. When I was able to develop a strong love for our country and a keen interest in government. That interest has continued throughout my entire life.

I suspect a similar interest have drawn many of you to this foundation, which I respect and appreciate for all that it does -- patriotism, love for our country, and hope for a brighter, better tomorrow.

It is also for the same reason that I ended up seeking the office that I now hold. I decided to run to become a United States Senator because I came to the conclusion that the federal government had become too big and too expensive. That was of great concern to me as I look at my children. I thought about the fact that this government, the government that sits now, is making decisions for them that will affect them for their entire lives.

It has accumulated an enormous amount of debt -- nearly $15 trillion worth of debt. It is hard to put that number into perspective sometimes. I like to try to break it down I get a few different ways to help people understand how large it is. $15 trillion in debt is roughly equivalent to $50,000 for every man, woman, and child in America. That includes everyone. That includes infants, it includes people who are retired, it includes people who are in college, high school, junior high, or grade school. It includes people in the middle of their careers. It includes everyone.

When you break it down by taxpayer, it is more like $150,000 a head. That is a lot of money…Yesterday Congress passed a law that will raise the debt limit by about another $2.50 trillion. That is a long-term indebtedness we have taken on through one piece of legislation. It is record-breaking. We have never taken on that much debt in our entire history. One piece of legislation.

People will be affected who are not yet old enough to vote for it. Some of the people who will be affected by it have yet to be born. This results in a pernicious form of taxation without representation.

It is, therefore, something we should avoid at all costs. We fought a war over things like taxation without representation a couple hundred years ago. We won that war. … That is why it is so important that we focus on restricting the power of government to borrow - because it is this power that sets off a cycle of government expansion.

Let me explain. Whenever government acts it does so at the expense of our individual liberty. When government expands, we become less free to that same corresponding degree. That is not to say that all government action is bad, it is to say only that we always have to balance government action against the countervailing interest we have in our individual liberties.

Sometimes it is worth it. We need the government to protect us from those who would harm us, steal from us, or impair our life, liberty, or property. But we always have to balance government action against what it does to our liberty.

As government expands, it requires money in order to expand. It requires money in order to do the things it needs to do to protect our life, liberty, and property. So it taxes us. When it taxes us, it acquires more power. That power erodes our individual liberty.

It often says, "we need more money to perform these basic services." then it gets more money and exerts more power. The cycle tends to perpetuate itself economically -- chance to perpetuate itself incrementally. There are a couple of things that can, should, and ought to interrupt the cycle so the government does not grow out of control, so we do not get to the point where government is telling us it has to do everything so that government does not leave anything to us.

One of those things is that we have elections. Because we have elections, those people who are being regulated by the government, having their liberty restrained by the government, and being taxed in order to fund the operation of government have some opportunity to weigh in and say this is not right. Especially when it comes time to raise taxes in order to pay for new government programs.

That is a significant opportunity for the voters to step in and say you're taking it a little too far, we are already having to work sometimes three, four, or five months out of the year to pay our federal taxes.

At the end of that time, the federal government has the audacity to tell us this is not enough. It has not been enough for a long time because you are almost $15 trillion in debt.

Our liberty is restrained that way. But we can stop that expansion of government whenever we see our tax burden is becoming larger.  We can vote in a different set of representatives to run the government so that they will tax us less.

Another way we can restrain government is by placing parameters around what it can regulate. We do this at the federal level through our founding era document also called the law if laws, that 240 year old document we call the U.S. Constitution.  It has fostered the development of the greatest civilization the world has ever known.

This document identifies a few basic roles and responsibilities for the federal government to make sure it does not overstep its bounds. It says the federal government will be in charge of a few things like national defense, immigration, weights and measures, declaring war. It was never intended to be all things to all people.

Both of those things can, should, and have in the past prevented the federal government from expanding beyond what is appropriate, beyond what we can tolerate, beyond what we should tolerate in terms of protecting ourselves and our liberty.

Over the last 75 years, the Supreme Court has eroded the concept that the federal government is one of limited enumerated powers. It has allowed the erosion to take place as it has taken a fairly consistently differential approach to laws Congress has passed.

There is another problem that has also, perhaps even to a greater degree, interrupted forces that would otherwise keep in check the growth of government. Whenever we propose a new government program, we no longer expect or require Congress to raise taxes immediately and to a corresponding degree.

Let's take for example a few years ago when a Republican controlled Congress passed into law and submitted to the president, and received the president's signature on, a law that created Medicare Part D. It is a prescription drug benefit for the Medicare program.

It is estimated by some that it carries with it unfunded liabilities in the amount of about $19 trillion. It creates benefits for people who are alive today that will cost about $19 trillion, according to those who make that estimate. $19 trillion more than our tax system as it exists now is capable of producing.

It was signed into law by a Republican president and enacted by a Republican Congress. It did not have an immediate effect. In fact, it did not result in a tax increase at all. It was passed when Congress was actually cutting taxes, which I generally regard as a good thing.

The problem is that because we as Americans did not feel a tax hit from it, there was not much of a reaction to it, because we delayed it through a practice that we refer to as deficit spending, spending money that we do not yet have, spending money that our children and our grandchildren might one day earn, spending money that we and those who come after us will have to repay.

When we do it that way, we interrupt the accountability of government -- of the same government that enacted the law. The same legislators that passed that into law are not the same legislators who are in office today.

Some of them are still there, but not all of them. They are certainly not the same ones that will be there a few years from now.  Most of them five or 10 years from now will have gone on to other things. Some will retire, others will have been defeated in elections. Some others might have even died.

But by the time the full economic impact of many of these programs is actually felt, those responsible for the creation of those programs are no longer present. This interrupts the most important part of any representative government -- accountability.

This is exactly why I believe we have to do something to restrict Congress' deficit spending power -- its power to borrow in the name of the United States. It has that power from the Constitution. There was good reason for the founding fathers to give Congress the power. We needed it to make sure we had enough money to fund the fighting of wars, to make sure we had enough money to provide for our country's basic needs, that Congress can do the things it was assigned to do.

It has been severely abused over a prolonged period of time. The time has come for us to restrict that power.

Some of this has been doom and gloom. My message is not a doom and gloom message. It is, instead, a charge. There is hope for us to do this because the people like you. There is hope because of your generation. There is hope because an entire group of American voters tens of millions strong are simultaneously awakened to the fact that the federal government has grown too big and too expensive.

We feel this expansion through this practice of perpetual deficit spending, people are voting differently as a result of that realization. Look at what happened in the 2010 general election. You had a new group of people swept into office and in the House of Representatives, and to an extent, in the Senate. Remember, Senators serve six year terms. Only a third of them are up for reelection every two years.

By contrast, in the House, all 435 are up for reelection every two years.  You had a much larger shift in the House than in the Senate. I predict that that trend is going to continue. What will happen in the 2012 election cycle, will make what happened in the 2010 election cycle look, by comparison, like a Sunday picnic.

In other words, what happened in 2010 is a mere prelude for what is going to happen next time around because you and people like you are all doing something about it.

They understand what three out of every four Americans believe that we need to do.

75% of all Americans according to a recent CNN poll believe we need to pass the balanced budget amendment to the constitution of the United States.

I believed so strongly in this I wrote a book about it. It is called "The Freedom Agenda." I wanted to give a brief, precise explanation of how we got into this mess, how we get to this point where we could have a government that could acquire $15 trillion in debt and regulate nearly aspect of our lives.

And most importantly, explain how we get out of it, and why this connection between deficit spending and the encroachment of our individual liberties gives us the key to the way out of it.

Just as deficit spending promotes this expansion of the government at the expense of our liberty, so too does the restriction of the deficit spending powers for a balanced budget amendment hold promise to restore our liberties, to restore what I refer to as "constitutionally limited government," to get the government thinking again that its goal is limited.

James Madison described the powers of the federal government as "few and defined" while describing the powers of the state as "numerous and indefinite."

That exist today largely in theory. Tomorrow, it will exist in practice because we, the American voters, will make it so. We, the American voters, have the power to dictate the proper course of our own government so we can preserve our own liberty and our own property and, at the end of the day, enhance our own lives.

It is my hope and prayer that each of us can do this. Each of us can help spread this message of hope. Each of us can tell people there is a way home that does not involve economic destruction.

When we look at the fact that most of the failed economies around the globe over the last 100 years or so have had one thing in common, we should be alarmed and motivated to push for a balanced budget amendment.

There are two economists who have recently written a book called "This time it’s different." They studied other economies to help the world and said, those economies overwhelmingly had a sovereign debt to gross domestic product ratio at or above 90%, meaning the amount of money passing through their economy every year was roughly equivalent to the total amount of debt that the national government of that country had acquired.

Our sovereign debt to GDP ratio stands at about 95%. We are well within the danger zone.  As a result, our economic growth will suffer significantly by as much as a third to half. In an economy as large as ours, that could mean the loss of one million jobs every year. 

We have to get out of it. Our ability to provide jobs, our ability to continue to be the world's most robust economy depends upon getting our house in order, but it is not just our financial well-being, it is also our individual liberty that will benefit as we take this step, as we pass a balanced budget amendment, and as we restore that which is properly ours.

If we do this, we can succeed again and we will prosper.  We can and we must. Together we will. May god bless America.