Judd Gregg: “we are now on the deficit reduction conference report. We have 10 hours of debate, 5 hours equally divided. I know my…”

“we are now on the deficit reduction conference report. We have 10 hours of debate, 5 hours equally divided. I know my colleague from North Dakota wants to speak tonight. Just for the edification of our membership, we will run some time off the clock tonight--I think about 2 hours--and then come back tomorrow and continue the debate and hopefully wrap this up tomorrow. This bill is a culmination of a lot of work done in the Congress, by the President, and by the Members of the Republican Party, to try to put some discipline into the fiscal accounts of the Federal Government. This bill represents the first time in 8 years that the Federal Government has attempted to control the rate of growth in entitlement spending. People who watch this debate understand this issue, but just to frame it again, Federal Government spending is divided into basically three different areas. There is interest on debt, which we have virtually no control over. There is the discretionary spending, otherwise known as the appropriations process, which means every year we spend a certain amount of money. It is really up to us how much we spend, and it is for specific programs. The majority of it goes to the defense spending, but other money goes to education, it goes to environmental issues, it goes to highways--things for which every year we appropriate, saying we are going to spend this much. We can change that number arbitrarily from year to year, and we do.…”