John Campbell: “you know, I find this whole debate rather perplexing. What the majority party is saying is that in order to leave…”

“you know, I find this whole debate rather perplexing. What the majority party is saying is that in order to leave people's taxes the same, in order to leave them where they are now, they have to raise taxes on somebody else. They have to pay for leaving your taxes alone by raising taxes on somebody else. Now, that's just warped logic. But let's just accept that warped logic for a minute and let's say that somehow leaving taxes alone required being paid for. What about reducing spending to pay for it? Where in this rule is the ability to have an amendment to do that? What about reducing spending instead of raising taxes? Now, later this week, we are likely to see a gigantic budget bill that will spend $50 billion more than last year. Where is the pay-for for that? Now, that's pretty clear. If you spend $50 billion, nearly $50 billion more than last year, that's a clear increase in spending for which you would think someone would want to pay for it. But instead, here you're going to leave people's taxes alone, the same as last year, and somehow that's a tax cut that has to be paid for? The logic is so distorted here, and the rationale is so distorted. Let's go ahead and spend all this extra money and not pay for it. You know that if you held the line on spending and didn't increase that spending this year and you looked at what that did over a 10-year period, you could almost pay for repealing the alternative minimum tax completely.…”