Angie Craig: “Mr. President, I had the privilege of beginning my service to the State of Idaho in 1981 in the U.S. House of…”

“Mr. President, I had the privilege of beginning my service to the State of Idaho in 1981 in the U.S. House of Representatives. By 1982, it had become obvious to me that the collective bias, if you will, inside the Congress and elsewhere in the Federal Government, at that time and still today, was largely to spend money, to tax when you had to, but clearly to spend money on those programs that you felt most beneficial to your constituency. And when taxation was not popular, the bias was to go ahead and borrow the money because--that was certainly popular in the 1970's and 1980's and into the early 1990's--if you could bring home one Government program after another and deliver it to your constituency, especially if you did not have to pay for it in the form of taxes, you were just an extremely popular politician and you tended to get reelected year after year after year. Thank goodness the attitude has changed a bit in Congress.”