Porter Goss: “Today I present my annual list of specific spending cut suggestions. I introduced these yesterday in the Record. Today I…”

“Today I present my annual list of specific spending cut suggestions. I introduced these yesterday in the Record. Today I want to talk a little bit about them and elaborate on them. These are 75 discretionary cuts which would save an estimated $275 billion, those are taxpayer dollars, over the next 5 years. That is just about double the amount of spending cuts the President has offered us in his most recent budget package. These savings could be produced without touching a single nondiscretionary item. Let me put that into English for the rest of America. Nondiscretionary item would mean entitlement, and that translates into Social Security, Medicare and so forth, Medicaid. This list of budget cuts I am submitting does not touch Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid or any of those items that we call entitlements. It is only the discretionary items, the things that we control the purse strings on here in the House of Representatives, the power of the purse as it were. It is imperative that before we ask Americans to sacrifice any of their earned benefits we demonstrate an ability to root out the hundreds of billions of dollars of wasteful spending in this Government.”