Cliff Stearns: “our efforts to balance the budget by the year 2002 have been a long and hard-fought process. As a party, we did not…”

“our efforts to balance the budget by the year 2002 have been a long and hard-fought process. As a party, we did not choose this fight, Mr. Speaker. The American people sent a message in the 1994 election. They made it perfectly clear that they wanted to change business here in the House, the business that has been going on for 40 years. This weekend I held town meetings back in my district, in the State of Florida, central Florida. There were two issues that came up continually. The first, of course, was Medicare. We have a lot of seniors there, and a lot of the seniors were confused. They thought we were cutting Medicare. Of course, that is false. I will tell the Members later on why that is false. They were also concerned about the veterans budget. Of course, we have increased the veterans benefits and the budget for the Record. We are not cutting Medicare, and we are not cutting veterans benefits. In both cases, they are going up over last year. President Clinton finally admitted this in an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN that Republicans are not cutting Medicare. He is right about that, because spending on this program will increase at twice the rate of inflation, which means that spending will rise from $5,100 this year to $7,000 in the year 2002. So how could spending, which increases from $5,200 a year in 1996 to $7,200 a year in 2002, be a cut? Nowhere also but in Washington.…”