Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I think as we take a look at this, number one, what we have to recognize is the significant amount of progress that we have made. Again, listening to some of the comments earlier about what happened in the eighties, the tax cuts and spending, the problem in the eighties was spending, and when we go back to the gentleman's earlier chart, I mean spending just went up, up, up, up. In 1995, when my colleague joined us here in Washington, we started to cut the growth. Again, we did not cut spending; we just cut the growth, projected growth of spending. Where we are this year, and I do not know if my colleague has his latest estimate, but the gentleman has been about our most accurate forecaster in Washington, but we are very close to actually being able to have a surplus in the general fund. I am not sure we are going to quite get there, so I will yield to the gentleman.”