William Tauzin: “You and I know something that the American public knows and that has been admitted in the balanced budget debate and…”

“You and I know something that the American public knows and that has been admitted in the balanced budget debate and admitted by Presidents who have served us now and have preceded us. That is, if we tried today to produce a balanced budget in this fiscal year, it would be practically impossible to do because we have committed ourselves to so much entitlement funding. Without massive changes in the way we fund entitlements in America, we cannot deliver a balanced budget to the President this year. That makes passing a line-item veto difficult, because it means for the years we cannot balanced the budget, the President is going to enjoy that extraordinary authority. I am going to suggest a change in the bill that is before us. I am going to suggest a change called the glide path amendment a little later on. The glide path amendment says that if we are smart enough, wise enough, and responsible to stay on the glide path that the CBO predicts we need to stay on to reach the balanced budget by the year 2002, the line-item veto authority would be limited to expenditures in excess of those numbers so that we can legitimately stay within the numbers that take us to a balanced budget by the year 2002 and not give the President this extraordinary authority because we cannot balance the budget this year.”