Chuck Grassley: “during this debate on this amendment, we have heard there is going to be $11 billion cut from various programs under the…”

“during this debate on this amendment, we have heard there is going to be $11 billion cut from various programs under the jurisdiction of the Senate Finance Committee. I have the budget resolution in front of me. I defy anybody to tell me where in this budget resolution there is an $11 billion cut. I want to make it clear. What has been said, thus far, is based on some assumptions, assumptions that, in the global view of all the possible assumptions that the Senate Finance Committee could draw on to save a little bit of money, it is in the realm of possibility, but it is a very extreme possibility of just exactly where the Senate Finance Committee ends up to save $3.4 billion, not $11 billion. This comes from the fact the budget includes an instruction to the Finance Committee to reconcile $3.4 billion over 5 years. Now, if you were talking on 'Main Street' in Waterloo, IA, about saving $3.4 billion over 5 years, out of the trillions of dollars that the Federal Government is going to spend over that period of 5 years, and you wanted to explain to somebody that you could not save a fraction of 1 percentage point, they would say: You better get some businessperson to serve in the U.S. Senate because the average businessperson has to deal with problems like that all the time. It is a small amount of money, but it is still some direction given to the committee.”