Heidi Alexander: “I have one message for my colleagues in the Senate and those who might be watching. It is about this chart, which is…”

“I have one message for my colleagues in the Senate and those who might be watching. It is about this chart, which is very simple. This is the line of what we call discretionary spending. This is about 31 percent of the budget. That is the budget agreement you have read about in the newspapers the last couple of days. That is what we are talking about. It is a blue line. It has to do with paying for our national defense, so it is about half of the dollars; then for our national parks, America's best idea; then for the National Institutes of Health, the source of medical miracles ranging from restoring your heart to curing Zika to the National Laboratories, which are the sources of our competition with the rest of the world. That is what this money is for. What the blue line recognizes is that for the last 10 years, the growth in spending for national defense, national parks, the National Institutes of Health, and National Labs has gone up at about the rate of inflation, and for the next 10 years, including the budget agreement that the President and the congressional leaders recommended this week, it will go at about the rate of inflation. The point is, for 20 years--2008 to 2029--the increase in spending for the amount of money we are talking about and for the type of spending in the budget agreement is not the source of the Federal deficit. What is? Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and interest-- that is the red line that 10 years ago was $1.8 trillion.…”