Luke Messer: “I appreciate Representative Van Hollen and his comments. As he well knows, this Chamber has twice considered sequester…”

“I appreciate Representative Van Hollen and his comments. As he well knows, this Chamber has twice considered sequester replacement bills put forward by the House Republican leadership, voted on and passed out of this Chamber. The alternatives are clear. I appreciate his recognition that this simple little calculation, while admittedly not going to change the planet Earth, it is important in providing budget transparency and helping the American taxpayer understand how much money we're spending here. We often hear, as you're out in townhall meetings, How much is $1 trillion? And what this bill simply shows is that if you take $1 trillion, if that's the deficit in a given year, and divide it by 145 million taxpayers we have, it adds up to about $6,800 per taxpayer that we are adding to our debt every year. Back where I come from in Indiana's Sixth Congressional District, that's a lot of money. He cited the number 750,000, and I would concede that $85 billion is a lot of money; but it represents about 2 percent of what we spend as a Nation every year in our $3.6 billion budget. I came to the House floor yesterday and held up two pennies representing the two cents--the two percent--the two cents out of every dollar that we're asking Congress to trim out of our Federal budget. Does anybody in America really believe that our Federal Government is so efficient and so effective that we can't afford to trim two cents out of every dollar?…”