Christopher Shays: “We are trying to get our financial house in order and balance the Federal budget. We are trying to save our trust funds…”

“We are trying to get our financial house in order and balance the Federal budget. We are trying to save our trust funds from bankruptcy, particularly Medicare. And we are trying to transform our caretaking, social, corporate and farming welfare state into an opportunity society. We do that by allowing our spending to grow. We allow it to grow 20 percent more each year, 20 percent or more in the next 6 years as opposed to the last 6 years, 20 percent more, from 8.7 billion to 10.4 billion. We do it by allowing the student loan program not to cut but to grow from 26 billion to 37 billion, a 42- percent increase. We take the earned income tax credit, which is an expenditure made by taxpayers to the working poor where they actually receive money rather than pay taxes, and that program over the last 6 years we spent 109 billion. We are going to spend 155 billion under our 6-year plan. Under welfare spending over the last 6 years we have spent 441 billion. In the next 6 years we will spend 30 percent more; we will spend 575 billion. In Medicaid we will grow from 463 billion over the last 6 years to 731 billion. We are going to spend 58 percent more in the next 6 years under Medicaid, which is health care for the poor and nursing care for the elderly.”