David Minge: “I share with the previous Member the commitment to finding a way to reduce taxes. Really the question is, however, not…”

“I share with the previous Member the commitment to finding a way to reduce taxes. Really the question is, however, not do we have a commitment to reduce taxes and believe that the bill that has been brought up or will be brought up tomorrow is a fair bill in that respect. The question is the timing. The previous speaker I think laid out quite clearly the issue, and that is to what extent are we selling a phony package to the American people by saying to them we have a surplus and we can balance the budget and go through a tax cut, without somehow compromising our commitment to stay the course and not add to our Nation's debt and not make it more difficult to solve the Social Security problems in the future? The simple answer is, we do not have a balanced budget. We are borrowing this year approximately $104 billion from the Social Security trust fund. This money is going into the general fund and supporting Federal programs. We are going to have a deficit of approximately $70 billion this year, an on-budget deficit of $70 billion. What does this mean? It means that we have not adequately planned for the future. We have not adequately planned for 1998, and we are proposing a tax cut when we have not balanced the budget. I think this is tragic. It also points up the fact that we do not yet even have a budget for the next fiscal year, and this too is tragic.”