Greg Ganske: “I reject the class warfare comments of my colleague from California. I hate to splash cold water on this budget because…”

“I reject the class warfare comments of my colleague from California. I hate to splash cold water on this budget because I know how hard the gentleman from Ohio, the chairman, and others have worked for it. Let us imagine that I owe $80 billion on this Visa credit card and I pay for that by transferring the $80 billion to this Mastercard. Do I still owe $80 billion? The answer, of course, is yes. My point of this is that in this budget agreement, we are transferring $80 billion from part A of Medicare home health care to part B. That is very creative accounting. Let us assume that we have part A represented by this cup and we have home health care by this ball. The table represents the Federal budget. I am going to put home health care in part A. Now because it is growing so fast, what I am going to do is I am going to take the ball and I am going to put it into part B. Are they still not on the Federal budget table? What this does is it just transfers $80 billion into the general account. That is smoke and mirrors, that is creative budgeting, that is a shell game.”