Gilbert Gutknecht: “Mr. Speaker and Members, I rise tonight to talk about our budget, the Federal budget and enforcing that budget. Now, I…”

“Mr. Speaker and Members, I rise tonight to talk about our budget, the Federal budget and enforcing that budget. Now, I came here with Mr. Jones and others with a fairly large class back in 1995 we were elected to Congress. And I will never forget one of the first meetings we were invited to was held by some of the top economics folks here in Washington and folks from the Congressional Budget Office. And they told us at that meeting that if we did not get serious about balancing the budget, we forget now that back throughout most of the 1980s, we were running deficits exceeding $200 billion, in fact, by today's accounting standards it would have probably approached $300 billion, but, nonetheless, we had this meeting and at the meeting they told us that if we in Congress did not get serious about balancing the Federal books, that by the time my children got to be my age, they could be facing a tax rate at the Federal level of over 80 percent just to pay the interest on the national debt. Well, the good news is we got serious about balancing the Federal budget. We limited the growth in Federal spending. We allowed the Federal budget to grow at a slower rate than the average family budget. And the net result is we went from $275 billion deficits to $250 billion surpluses. And that happened largely because we controlled Federal spending. From 1995 until 2000, total Federal spending only grew at an average rate of about 3.2 percent.”