Jeff Miller: “today is a day we should feel good, feel positive, feel happy, because there are some great accomplishments that we…”

“today is a day we should feel good, feel positive, feel happy, because there are some great accomplishments that we should be proud that have been announced this week and that we are going to pass on the floor here today. We are hearing all this sky is falling rhetoric from the other side and this fear and scare tactics, oh, my gosh, what is happening next. Well, first of all, the Treasury Department announced this week that we had $124 billion surplus in this past fiscal year that just ended a few weeks ago, $124 billion surplus. Now, $1 billion was taken out of Social Security, so we have not quite met our goal. But the fact is we had a huge accomplishment. That is real numbers. That is not OMB numbers. That is not CBO numbers. That is real dollars. In the past 2 years, according to the Treasury Department, actual debt reduction is $138 billion. Real reduction. We have finally accomplished that. Now, a lot of our colleagues on the other side think it was the tax increases in 1990 and 1993. In 1995, when President Clinton submitted his budget, he projected $200 billion deficits as far as the eye could see. We said, no, that is not good enough. We want to have at least a balanced budget by 2002. Thank God we made it sooner than that. So we should be glad that we have accomplished this already with real dollars.”