Gilbert Gutknecht: “It was a wonderful trip over there. We cannot help but be proud of the young men and women who serve us in the armed…”

“It was a wonderful trip over there. We cannot help but be proud of the young men and women who serve us in the armed forces and the job that they do, whether it is in Bosnia or Yugoslavia, East Timor, Haiti. We have had so many deployments over the last 8 years that we are just stretching our people far too thin. I think the other issue we are raising here is the whole issue of burden sharing. Bosnia alone has costs us, as members of the Committee on the Budget, almost $20 billion now. And it is really hard for us to see any real evidence that we are making any real progress. The same is true with Yugoslavia. It is time for our allies. We are spending about 3 percent of our gross domestic product on defense. Our European allies are spending an average 1 rac{1}{2} percent. That has made our job a whole lot more difficult in terms of balancing the budget. I just want to come back to a couple of points that my colleague raised, and I think they really need to be repeated because everybody likes to take credit. It is like the little red hen in baking the bread. Nobody wanted to help grow the wheat. Nobody wanted to help harvest the wheat. Nobody wanted to help to grind the wheat. Nobody wanted to help bake the bread. But everybody wants to take credit once the bread has been baked. If we go back to where we were in 1995 when the President proposed his budget in the spring of 1995, we were looking at deficits of over $200 billion well into the future.”