Steny Hoyer: “perhaps the chairman believes what he says. If so, he is extraordinarily wrong. But those of us who have been here for…”

“perhaps the chairman believes what he says. If so, he is extraordinarily wrong. But those of us who have been here for some period of time have heard this rhetoric before, over and over again. In 1993, when we offered an economic program, every leader, the chairman of the Committee on the Budget, the ranking member of the Committee on the Budget, Speaker Gingrich, Leader Armey, an economist, came to this floor and said if you adopt the Democratic alternative, the economy is going to go to hell in a handbasket. They were 180 percent absolutely wrong. In point of fact, we had the best economy, the best economic performance in the next 8 years that we have had in the history of America. They do not know what they are talking about. Maybe they believe it, but they are wrong. Let us compare the 8 years under George Bush, George Bush the senior, and George Bush 'W.' They ran deficits of $2.5 trillion. There is one person in America that can stop spending in its tracks, just one, the President of the United States. Neither George Bush nor his son have ever had a veto overridden stopping spending. Not once. Let us get real. Under the 8 years of the Clinton budget, which the Republicans said would take us down the road of deficits and unemployment, we had a $61 billion surplus and ran the last 4 years in surplus, the first time that had happened in the lifetime of anybody in this room. Get real. Stop giving us this stuff.”