On the recordJune 15, 2010
And add to that, on top of that, the Republicans allowing the PAYGO statute and the PAYGO rules to expire. A big part of the reason--under the budget that was passed by President Clinton, we adopted under a Democratic administration, Democratic leadership a pay-as-you-go rule that said that we're not going to spend more than we take in. I mean, just like people have to do in their own households. And when we came back into the majority, we readopted those rules. And now we have the PAYGO statutes reestablished. And what we need to make sure we continue to do--except for emergency spending, which in an economy that's as dire as this one, we've had a number of different emergency situations. But making sure that other than emergency situations, we pay for the legislation that we're passing, whether it's including the war costs in the budget and actually having it be real numbers instead of pretending that we don't have an ongoing obligation when it comes to war funding. We included the costs of the Iraq war in the Appropriations Act, in the budget, unlike the Republicans who just pretended year to year that we weren't going to actually have that expense. So we have been trying to be responsible. We have been trying to make sure that we can get things back on track, and that, like you said, we can establish some parameters. Unfortunately, our colleagues on the other side of the aisle think that government is always an obstacle; government can never be a solution.
