David Schweikert: “Those of us on the right who are more conservative--we have our folks who are guilty of this, and, heaven knows, I see…”

“Those of us on the right who are more conservative--we have our folks who are guilty of this, and, heaven knows, I see it from our friends on the left--where we hold up a shiny object and pretend like this would take care of this fiscal cliff that is no longer very far in the future. It is here. We say, oh, if we would just adjust this on foreign aid, we would be fine. Anyone who says something like that, they don't own a calculator. So the slide next to us right now--and the gentleman and I were working on this earlier today. I thank the gentleman and his staff for their willingness to sit there and, shall we say, geek out with calculators, budgets, and actuarial tables. One of the things that has happened--about every 3 months, I do one of these presentations. If someone were ever to go back a few years when we did the very first one, parts of these numbers have actually gotten much worse. Even though we are supposedly out of the recession and we are supposed to be in a healthier economy, as we keep being told from the other side, the fiscal, the financial shape of the country is worse. How is that possible? Mr. Speaker, I am going to make the argument that when we do examine what we were telling folks our financial situation was in the future, it is actually much worse. In 2011 we said, hey, when we finally get to that year 2016, we are going to have 3.3 percent GDP.…”