Christopher Shays: “I was elected to the statehouse in 1974 and began service in 1975 and I could never understand how Congress would be…”

“I was elected to the statehouse in 1974 and began service in 1975 and I could never understand how Congress would be able to spend more than it raised in revenues and deficit-spend. I knew that on the State level we had to balance our State budgets. I vowed when I was elected in 1987 that my first priority would be to get our financial house in order and be part of that effort. There was a small group of us, only 30 at the time, who voted for a budget that the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Kasich] introduced which began to do that, and each year we saw that number increase. Finally this year we saw a Congress that over 300 Members voted for a balanced budget amendment. But it would be kind of silly to vote for a balanced budget amendment and not be willing to vote to balance the budget, and we set out to balance the budget. It was a long and an arduous task in which we spent the last 11 months to in fact balance the budget in 7 years. We submitted that budget and it was vetoed by the President.”