Jeff Miller: “this bill is an integral part of our effort to balance the budget, the moral and economic challenge of our time. This…”

“this bill is an integral part of our effort to balance the budget, the moral and economic challenge of our time. This bill meets its share of the burden and therefore deserves every Member's support. These are the tough choices we are having to make to balance this budget. These are the specifics that follow after the budget that we approved earlier this year, and we have prioritized what we consider the most important areas, funded those, and said, wait a minute, do we need to fund everything just because it has been in the budget for years and years and years? Mr. Chairman, this bill was not undertaken in a haphazard or malicious way. We went about this very thoughtfully and determined our priorities. We have over 1,200 programs under our jurisdiction in this subcommittee and for each one, we asked a simple question: Is this Federal undertaking absolutely critical or can it be reformed or eliminated? Some programs which were not found to be Federal concerns were eliminated, while others were deemed essential and received increases. By setting priorities, we eliminated programs that do not work and strengthened ones that do. Spending taxpayer dollars on useless programs is not compassion. Balancing the budget and setting priorities is real and true compassion. There are many programs which we found to be essential.…”