Todd Rokita: “I thank the gentleman from New Jersey. Mr. Chairman, like speakers before me, I am thankful and appreciative that others…”

“I thank the gentleman from New Jersey. Mr. Chairman, like speakers before me, I am thankful and appreciative that others are proposing substitute budgets. It is good to have options, Mr. Chair. It is good to have a debate. But not all options are equally good, so I rise against the substitute budget that is now before us. Admittedly, there are a couple of different ways and a combination thereof that you can balance a budget: spending cuts--and, by the way, when a Federal Government already takes, on average, 20 percent of the value of all the goods and services that a country produces, a lot of us think that is more than enough to run the government and that spending reductions are actually the solution. Revenue increases might also get you to balance. That is certainly what this Progressive substitute tries to do. Nearly $6 trillion in tax increases over the next 10 years. And, by the way, Mr. Chairman, they don't get to balance. It doesn't happen. $6 trillion more of the people's property this budget confiscates, and they still can't balance the budget. Why is balancing the budget so darn important? Well, a couple different reasons. You cannot start paying off the debt until you get to a balanced budget so that you have a surplus to start paying that debt down. So their intention, Mr. Chair, is not to pay down the debt. That is what they are stating in this budget, and, frankly, that's immoral.…”