Barney Frank: “first, let me plead guilty to one of the accusations that was leveled by the previous speaker. I do believe that older…”

“first, let me plead guilty to one of the accusations that was leveled by the previous speaker. I do believe that older people who are sick should have their prescription drugs covered. The fact that there are 70- and 80-year-old women who did not serve in the armed forces and who cannot afford their prescription medicine does not seem to me a good reason to deny them a prescription drug benefit under Medicare. So I will plead guilty to that accusation. Indeed, that is one of the reasons why I am opposed to this bill. Much of what it does is very important, the pay increase and the improvement in the living conditions for the people; but it maintains an effort to fund inadequately an extremely flawed strategy. Obviously, we should provide the funds necessary to carry out what we say we are going to do militarily. The problem is we say we are going to do too much. We continue to err by keeping large numbers of troops in Western Europe when our Western European allies are well enough financed to be able to do this on their own. We continue to hold to an obsolete two-war theory. We continue to fund weapons whose idea began in the Cold War. So, yes, I want an adequately funded military. I want one with a margin of safety. I want the United States to be as it has been and will continue to be by far the strongest Nation in the world. But we make a mistake when we overreach and then use the overreach as an excuse to overspend.”