David Minge: “That is exactly my point. We are corrupting the process here to be able to boast that we have done something that has…”

“That is exactly my point. We are corrupting the process here to be able to boast that we have done something that has not quite been achieved. I think that is one tragedy. The second is, we have not even talked here in our discussion about Social Security about the enormous and really it was a phony tax cut proposal that was passed through these bodies this fall. There was an effort to I think pander to the American people about a tax cut that many of our colleagues would never have voted for if they had expected the President to sign it, and that would have destroyed our opportunity to say that we were indeed balancing the budget without using Social Security. There was no really effective enforcement mechanism there, there is no effective enforcement mechanism now, and the consequence is that what we are doing is we are sowing the seeds of disillusionment of the American people of this institution. I think that we ought to be forthright, we ought to have the integrity to stand up and say, it might be next year if that is really what we are doing, and the leadership in this body is taking us down this sort of rosy scenario path. What I really resent about this path is that we again are attempting to mislead our citizens. This Wall Street Journal article lays it out factually.…”