Bill Bennett: “we are awaiting the conference report on the stimulus package. The papers and the airwaves are full of the fact that…”

“we are awaiting the conference report on the stimulus package. The papers and the airwaves are full of the fact that this will be the largest expenditure we have made in peacetime perhaps in our history. I think it well, as we wait for the details of the package, for us to pause for a moment and take a longer look, beyond the recession, beyond the financial circumstances we are facing at the moment, and look down the road at what we are facing as a nation as a whole. So I am going to make a historic pattern today and then introduce, at the end, a bill I believe is necessary for us to deal with our financial problems. Let's go back a moment in history to the year 1966. Why do I pick 1966? Because that was the year we significantly expanded the entitlement spending in the United States. That was the year we adopted Medicare as a Federal program. As you see from the chart, at that time the mandatory spending constituted 26 percent of the budget. By ``mandatory,'' I mean spending that we have to do. People are entitled to receive that money whether we have the money or not; it is mandatory under the law. The largest portion of the mandatory spending in 1966 was Social Security. We were paying roughly 7 percent of our budget for interest. We had nondefense discretionary spending which was 23 percent. The big item, the big ticket item that dominated the budget in 1966 was defense. It constituted 44 percent of Federal spending in 1966.”