Steve Womack

The deficit will be over $1 trillion--that is with a T.

I have to question the point of the exercise today.

Our fiscal trajectory, it is not sustainable.

It is time to make tough choices, that even programs that have been around a long time, it is time to figure out, in an era of $23 trillion national debt where do we make tradeoffs?

But I just want to be clear that this Committee did produce a budget in that year.

When you show us your budget, you show us your values.

All of that money that goes into net interest on the debt... serves to crowd out other funding that might otherwise be available.

So we are just paying the interest on the debt. All the while, the debt continues to go higher and higher.

The biggest threat to all of these priorities, and to the long-term security of our nation, is our out-of-control mandatory spending.

I applaud the President for actually doing a budget.

About 65 analysts are devoted to producing cost estimates after full committee markup, but producing estimates on the routine basis before markup would eliminate some of the work that now occurs afterward.

Allow the chairman of the committee or the chair of the Committee on the Budget to request CBO prepare a preliminary report, including estimated budgetary authority on legislation to be considered in committee.

It is my strong belief that in the last two decades, thanks to the efforts in the entire readiness scenario to better prepare our men and women in uniform to perform battlefield medicine has saved a lot of lives.

Republicans and Democrats have to start behaving more like Americans in deciding what we have got to do now to solve the problems today rather than kick those--that can down the road and put it on future generations.

The best thing to do is do nothing because it gets cut on its own in about five or six short years.

Most politicians don't like to raise taxes. And most politicians don't like to cut benefits that have currently accrued a certain people, but at the end of the day when you have a trillion dollar deficit as far as the eye can see…

There is a reason why we are in this fix right now. And we can blame it on taxes.

I believe I have heard from more than one of my colleagues on the other side that it only helped the millionaires and the billionaires.

The money is on the mandatory side of spending.

So the point of my remarks here is to call on the Congress to do its job.

There is enough stink on this deficit and debt issue to go around this room and around the Congress and around previous Congresses and previous Presidents, left and right.

We simply must start making tough budgetary decisions in order to put our country on a responsible fiscal path and deliver on our duty to the American people.

Make no mistake, if we continue down this reckless path, CBO confirms that we will face the severe threat of a fiscal crisis, which will negatively impact every single American.

It should be deeply unsettling to all of us here in this room that Fiscal Year 2020 will be the first year since fiscal 2012 that the deficit will eclipse a trillion.

In order to truly capitalize on this historic moment of economic prosperity for the benefit of state and local governments and all Americans, we must finally come together to put our nation's finances on a sustainable path.