Political Quotes

“I was not a Member of this body whenever the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act was passed, but it was one of those many efforts we have had to control spending in this Government. While well-intentioned, the law did fall short of what it was to do. Mostly, it could be rendered in the neutral position just by waiver vote. In 1990, I would remind my colleagues, I introduced a little bill called the 4-percent solution. Now, there are a lot of scare tactics going on around here. They are telling a lot of folks that it is going to cost them more money, the benefits are going to be slashed. Let us call them exactly what they are. They are scare tactics. I come out of county government. The Senator from Kentucky came out of State government. I expect he probably ran his State a lot better than we ran our county. But when I left, we had a lot of money in the bank, we had a reserve. The three county commissioners were budget cutters, they were the budget setters, and they were the appropriators. It is a little bit different here, so that is where maybe a little bit of our problems start. The 4-percent solution said this. We could establish a budget based on previous years' expenditures, not this baseline budgeting of add 6 percent and they will say, OK, you are either over the baseline or under the baseline, which nobody knew what it was.”