Lynn N. Rivers: “there are two issues I want to raise. I want to talk a little bit about the so-called 1 percent solution, but before I…”

“there are two issues I want to raise. I want to talk a little bit about the so-called 1 percent solution, but before I do that I want to speak to the issue that was just raised about decisions being made about eliminating programs. It is interesting when we were in committee in the Committee on the Budget when we asked repeatedly for the specifics of the proposal, what was going to be cut, what was going to be changed, it was very clear that we were not going to get that information. The argument that was put forward was that we really want to leave this to the committee chairs to make those decisions. Interestingly, tonight the committee chairman has a lot of arguments to make about programs that are not under his jurisdiction, about how many are too many. Now, why is that? Why could we not have some specificity about what we thought was going to be cut and what was bad in committee, but now we have arguments? Mr. Chairman, if in fact there are far too many training programs, far to many housing programs, far too many programs in general, why have the majority's appropriation people not come forward with those cuts in the 4 years that they have been controlling the procedure? Why did we have to wait until tonight for the chairman of the Committee on Budget to say in fact that the appropriation chairs have been making all of these bad decisions over the last few years? I do not understand. Now, I want to talk about the 1 percent solution, so-called.…”