Chris Chocola: “I came to Congress from the business world, and my first impression when I got here is that Congress, as a whole, is a…”

“I came to Congress from the business world, and my first impression when I got here is that Congress, as a whole, is a lot like 535 general managers with no CEO. With all due respect to the Speaker and our leadership, there is no individual who can set spending priorities in the face of limited resources. We do not have a leadership problem here. We have a process problem. When we take the facts, combined together that our budget process does not contain any of the realities that every family and every business in America faces; combined with the fact that our process is not enforceable; combined with the fact that our process only measures success by how much money we spend, never by how well we spend it; combined with the fact that people in this Chamber will come down here with a straight face and say that smaller increases are actually cuts; if we combine those facts with human nature, what we have is a lack of fiscal discipline and runaway spending. I used to be a chairman of a publicly traded company, and if I accounted for and budgeted for my business the way government accounts and budgets for its business, I would, at best, be bankrupt and fired. I would more than likely be in jail.”