Pete Stark: “This is the first President since Herbert Hoover to lose jobs during his Presidency. In the same report, the President…”

“This is the first President since Herbert Hoover to lose jobs during his Presidency. In the same report, the President tried to reinvent history of our current recession and blame it on the Clinton administration; but the National Bureau of Economic Research, the only body that can date a recession, continues to say it began March 2001, under the watch of George W. Bush. More recently, there was subterfuge to hide an analysis done by the administration experts on the cost of their Medicare prescription drug bill, which narrowly passed the House, with assurance that it would cost no more than $400 billion. The chairman of the Committee on the Budget, the chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means and others assured us that, in fact, it would cost perhaps less than $400 billion, when the administration knew that the costs would be higher than their own analysis says, $535 billion. They could not have passed the bill if their own Members had known about this price tag. So what did they do? The administration suppressed the information and told the actuary who had done the work if he released that data he would be fired so fast his head would spin. This is not an administration that can be trusted. They lie, they bury facts, they threaten people to make sure that their side of the story is presented, and it is reason enough alone to vote ``no'' on this budget presented to us today.”