Tom Tancredo: “it is so true that the perception that is held by so many people, even here in this town, certainly on the other side of…”

“it is so true that the perception that is held by so many people, even here in this town, certainly on the other side of the aisle and over at the White House, is that the country will actually not only survive another tax increase but we can get away with it because, again, as I say, times are good. Somehow this blanks out everything else. We assume that we can then start promising everything to everybody again. We can come up with how many hundred programs were mentioned, how many hundreds of billions of dollars of expenditures were suggested by the President in his budget? All of this, with keeping a straight face and suggesting that we are not going to, quote, bust the budget; we are going to maintain an agreement. Of course, the only way that he could possibly make that statement, Mr. Speaker, the only way is because he was able to play a shell game with the Social Security issue. He was able to suggest that we could take, as he says, 62 percent, the President of the United States in his State of the Union message, and since then has suggested that we could take 62 percent of the ``Social Security surplus,'' apply it toward Social Security and, somehow or other, that would solve our problem; and that would allow for, of course, us to do other things. It would create other programs.…”