Pete Domenici: “I made a few remarks 3 or 4 days ago talking about where we are and what we are doing, and I would like to finish those…”

“I made a few remarks 3 or 4 days ago talking about where we are and what we are doing, and I would like to finish those remarks today, perhaps start on a discussion of the American economy. First, in less than 5 days the new fiscal year begins. That means if you are a businessman, no matter how small or how large, you would be closing down your books, you would be adding everything up, you would be doing a couple of additions and subtractions, and you would find out how well or how poorly you did--a very important event in the life of an ongoing business. The United States is similar except it is much bigger. Frankly, it does not keep its books nearly as well as the small businesspeople of America, who must keep them much better than we do because of the Internal Revenue Service if nothing else. We are not audited by anybody. We do ours in some strange ways. The truth is that the year ends October 1. I think both the occupant of the Chair and the Senator from New Mexico can remember when it was July. We found out that was too soon in the year. If you started a year in January, you started work, it was too quick to have everything done in July. So we had a completed year, since I have been a Senator, when we went to October. We had to fix that up. And now October was thought to be ample time to get our work done. Not a single appropriations bill has been sent to the President.”