Tom Harkin: “Our budget has basically two purposes. Any budget, whether it is your own personal family budget, a business budget, or…”

“Our budget has basically two purposes. Any budget, whether it is your own personal family budget, a business budget, or the Government budget, has two purposes: One is to balance income and outlays--in other words, what is the income and what are the outlays, try to get some balance between the two--and the second purpose is to set priorities, choices. I am sure the Senator is like I am. When you have an income, you sit down and say, this is our income. What is our mortgage? What is our car payment? What is our tuition, all those sorts of things. You add it up and you make choices on how you budget. That is what this budget is. It is about choices, the choices that this President has chosen: tax breaks for the wealthy, continue those and make them permanent; continue to ship our jobs overseas; continue to underfund education, as the Senator has pointed out; and continue this march towards bigger and bigger debt, bigger and bigger deficits that is going to choke off any hope of having a viable Social Security and Medicare system for our kids and grandkids. Those are the choices in this budget.”