Political Quotes

“I think in some ways you just described why the fussing over the budget documents is going on. We put together some interesting slides here that we have never presented before. We took these from a researcher at Manhattan and a couple of other places. Then Joint Economics, some of my economists, did some math here. We set this for 2033. We actually had a year that is 10 budget years from now. We did not put in the fact that the Social Security trust fund is gone, and there is $616 billion that needs to somehow be recapitalized. That is actually not in this deficit number. We also rolled the number. The baseline for anyone that is really geeky out there, we ran this to the standard debt-to-GDP number. There is a new update on what debt will be 9 years from now that is now $3.1 trillion. If interest rates stay as high as they are spiking right now, it could be as high as 3.7. We are going to use the $2.5 trillion. The reason this board exists is we took--and I have a bunch of slides we are going to walk through, but I need to set up the pitch first. If we took every tax that our Democrat colleagues talk about in the Ways and Means Committee and did what they call a revenue-maximizing rate, there is a rate that you can charge that the economists--this is economic modeling where you maximize tax collections before it rolls over and people change their behavior and the tax collections go down.…”