Heidi Alexander: “if another Senator wishes to speak, I will be succinct. I will try to do mine in a less period of time. I thank the…”

“if another Senator wishes to speak, I will be succinct. I will try to do mine in a less period of time. I thank the Chair for its courtesy. I wish to speak on two subjects. First, there has been a good deal of discussion in Washington about making sure we continue to operate the government over the weekend and on into next week while we get about the important business of reducing our debt. Our national debt is an urgent problem. Members on both sides of the aisle understand this, and have said this. We have 64 Senators who have written the President to say we are ready to go to work on reducing the debt on the whole budget. We have a proposal from Congressman Ryan. We have a proposal from the Bowles commission. We are ready to go to work. The House of Representatives has made a proposal to, for the time being, continue the government while we work on that, and that is eminently reasonable. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a Wall Street Journal op-ed from April 4 by Gary Becker, George Shultz, and John Taylor that points out that the numbers in the House of Representatives proposal would have the Federal Government spend for the rest of the year basically what we spent in 2008, plus an allowance for inflation. There is no reason, the authors say, why government agencies, from Treasury and Commerce to the executive office of the President, cannot get by with the same amount of funding they spent in 2008 plus increases for inflation.…”