Christopher Shays: “This Republican majority is trying to get our financial house in order and balance the Federal budget. My colleague…”

“This Republican majority is trying to get our financial house in order and balance the Federal budget. My colleague knows that just balancing the budget is not the end all and be all. It is just the logical realization that we would rather spend our money on real programs rather than interest on the national debt. We want a strong foundation in which to build. The second thing is we are trying to save our trust funds from bankruptcy, particularly Medicare, and last year when we were trying to save it, when we did our Medicare plan we saved about $240 billion that could be used directly to save Medicare part A and Medicare part B. To save it from bankruptcy we extended the program out from the year 2001 to basically 2010. We are going to have another problem that we are not going to get into right now, but it is going to be a mammoth issue of how do we deal with the baby boomers. But we did the responsible thing of slowing the growth of programs, still allowing them to grow 60 percent more total dollars and 50 percent more per beneficiary, but saving about $240 billion that could be used to then make sure the program was solvent for the next 15 years. And the President vetoed that plan.”