Sam Farr: “I rise because I want to respond to my chair, who I respect deeply, but I think there is sort of a misstatement of fact…”

“I rise because I want to respond to my chair, who I respect deeply, but I think there is sort of a misstatement of fact here. The only budget that has ever been balanced in the last 20 years has been the budget that the Democrats did. We did an unholy thing that the other party can't accept that is going to be necessary to balance any budget, and that is we had to increase revenues. And what did we do? We closed the tax loopholes on the richest families in this country and corporations. We closed loopholes. And we made a lot of cuts, because we also dedicated revenue from those loophole closures to pay off the deficit. And, guess what? We paid it off. We paid it off ahead of schedule. When the Clinton administration left town and the Bush administration came on, we had an $800 billion surplus--a surplus. And what immediately did they do? They repealed the mechanism that was balancing the budget and said, no, we will give back those tax loopholes to the richest people in the country. And then we go to war. Whenever in history we have gone to war, people have paid for it. Not these wars. We just put it on the credit card. So, Mr. Kingston, you know, let's be factual about the Democrats being in charge. We were able to balance the budget, something that your party hasn't done. And just on this whole WIC thing, we all know that the administration administers the program and has to estimate how many people are going to be in need.…”