On the recordJuly 19, 2011
For more than an hour, I've listened to floor debate, and it seems like one side wants to say that we have to cut and the other side says that any cut we do is wrong. One side says we have to do tax increases. The other side says no. What the American people need to hear, Mr. Speaker, is we now spend almost a quarter of every dollar produced in our economy, and as my now deceased father-in-law would have said, Taxes are rocks in your knapsack. The American people cannot afford to have more and more weight on the economy. This is not an argument about how much we spend. This is an argument about what the American people can afford in overhead that ultimately hurts our competitiveness in jobs big and small, foreign and domestic. So I will be voting for this and every other initiative that can possibly give the American people a fighting chance to compete for good-paying jobs here and in competition with the rest of the world. I urge the support of the bill.
