Barney Frank: “we know finally that this is not the real budget. This is the fake budget. Everybody knows that this budget is too low.…”

“we know finally that this is not the real budget. This is the fake budget. Everybody knows that this budget is too low. But we have people who do not like to admit that they were wrong. They do not like to admit they were wrong in 1997 with that Balanced Budget Act with those silly caps. They do not like to admit that they voted for an inadequate budget out of party loyalty earlier. So this budget will go out of here inadequately funded. It will go to the other body. It will go into negotiations with the President. Low and behold, it will get bigger. So we should not fight too much about which inadequacies we deal with here. Let us make a statement in principle that we are in favor of the tobacco lawsuit; and when this bill goes to other places which are a little less addicted to unreality, and adequate funding magically appears, then we will be able fully to fund the contributions to the lawsuit and I hope to do even better for veterans health than we have done in this budget.”