Judd Gregg: “this amendment is a classic tax-and-spend amendment of which we have seen a large number coming from the other side…”

“this amendment is a classic tax-and-spend amendment of which we have seen a large number coming from the other side during markup. In fact, $133 billion in new taxes and $126 billion in new programs were offered by the other side. That is called growing the Government--dramatically. It is also called putting a lot of burden on people working to pay taxes. This amendment is a continuation of that approach. The euphemism ``loophole'' is used to try to avoid the fact that what we are proposing is major tax increases to pay for this. If you are going to have a responsible budget, you have some budget discipline. You have set priorities. We have attempted to do that with this budget. Certainly this Presidency has done a great deal in the area of education. The Senator from Massachusetts says we need a massive effort in the area of education. I would say adding $9 billion just last month into the higher education accounts is a pretty big effort. The Senator from Massachusetts voted against that. It was in the Deficit Reduction Act where we took a big chunk of money and put it into higher education. I believe $4.5 billion went to low-income students who were college bound. There was about $4 billion which went to reduce origination fees for students who want to go to college. Those are big numbers. And $1.9 billion went to people who were taking up special education as their vocation when they got out of college or math/ science.…”