James Hill: “a politician's first instinct is to promise everything to everybody. It is a lot easier for politicians to say yes to…”

“a politician's first instinct is to promise everything to everybody. It is a lot easier for politicians to say yes to everybody and put off the tough choices until later. That is why this House set up a budget process that forces us to make tough choices between our competing priorities. It is the same process every responsible American family and business follows. Before they start spending money, they sit down and figure out how much they have. In a perfect world we would have all the money we needed to take care of all our priorities. But this is not a perfect world. We have to make tough choices. If we want to give people bigger tax cuts, we will have to take some money out of Social Security and Medicare. If we want to pay down more debt, we will have to restrain spending or tax cuts. Let us do the hard work first. Let us write a budget, laying out our priorities, then let us give people tax cuts. President Bush and the Senate are debating tax cuts within a budget framework and we should be doing that in the House as well.”