Gilbert Gutknecht: “I happen to believe that PAYGO rules ought to apply to tax cuts, too. But this is all about the politics of the…”

“I happen to believe that PAYGO rules ought to apply to tax cuts, too. But this is all about the politics of the possible, and we cannot get that done this year. So we can take this step this year, this day to begin to constrain Federal spending. Let me also respond to something else. Our friends on the left cannot have it both ways. They cannot say, well, we need to invest in this program and that program and this program for people, and if we put more money into education, the argument is we will get it back ten-fold, but we do not want to pay any interest on that money. We cannot have it both ways. Fifty-five percent of what we will spend this year will be for what are called entitlement programs, and many of those entitlement programs were sold as investments in people. Now we are being told, but we get no return on that investment. This is just an expenditure, and it is lost forever. So as we debate this, I know that people are going to come at this from different perspectives, but let us try to at least be honest with ourselves. We have a system right now, and the rules and the way the system works encourages more and more spending. The debate today simply is about this: are we going to enforce the budgets that we pass here in the House and are we going to change the rules to give the taxpayers an even break?”