Gilbert Gutknecht: “I am proud of what we did through most of the 1990s. When we came here, when I was elected in 1994 and came here in the…”

“I am proud of what we did through most of the 1990s. When we came here, when I was elected in 1994 and came here in the spring of 1995, I remember we had some meetings with some of the economists and people from the Congressional Budget Office. And we have to go back and remember what was happening in America. We were running deficits every year of $250 billion and more, and we can all point fingers and blame this and blame that; but at the end of the day, we were spending more than the taxpayers were sending in, and America wanted us to do something about this. At one of the meetings we were at, we had some economists saying, if Congress does not get serious about balancing the Federal budget, that by the time my children got to be my age they would be paying an effective tax rate to the Federal Government of over 80 percent, just to pay the interest on the national debt. Now, I come from a rural district, and I think most folks from rural communities understand this, because it really has been part of the rural ethic, particularly those who are farm families, to pay off the mortgage and leave the kids the farm. What we have been doing is we were literally selling the farm and leaving our kids the mortgage.”