Tom Harkin: “let me thank my colleague Senator Boxer for always being on point and for always being very eloquent in her focus and…”

“let me thank my colleague Senator Boxer for always being on point and for always being very eloquent in her focus and explanation of the fallacies of the Ryan-Romney budget and how it is going to affect our middle-class families in the future. Since we recessed around the 1st of August and have been out of session, Congressman Paul Ryan--our colleague in the House--has become the Vice Presidential nominee of the Republican Party, and, of course, Mr. Romney has accepted the nomination to be President. Congressman Ryan is not an unknown quantity. He has been here quite a few years, and as the head of the Budget Committee he has put forward a couple budgets. Budgets are blueprints. If one is going to build a building or a house, they need a blueprint. If you are going to try to move the country in a certain direction, you need a blueprint, and that blueprint is a budget. A budget sort of tells us where it is that the proponent of that budget wants to take us as a country--a Federal budget. If it was a State budget, we would say that is where they want to take the State. So we on this side intend, over the next several days, couple weeks-- however long we are in session--to let the American people know what is in the Ryan budget and where it would take America: What is the blueprint they have for America?…”