On the recordJune 16, 2011
I thank the gentleman. Tough decisions, however, are not to pretend there's a free lunch. What we buy, we need to pay for, and if we don't want to pay for it, we shouldn't buy it. Now, frankly, that didn't happen under each one of the budgets that we adopted from 2001 to 2008, the 2009 budget. It didn't happen. We spent far beyond that which we paid for in those budgets, and that took a $5.6 trillion surplus projection to an almost 100 percent turnaround and an over $10 trillion projected deficit. I'll just say to the gentleman, I agree with you. We need to make the tough decisions. We may need to make the tough decisions on cutting spending. We need to make the tough decisions on paying for what we buy. Hopefully, we will have the courage and the wisdom on both sides of the aisle to do just that.
