Gilbert Gutknecht

I was trying to think, how can we use some kind of a prop or some kind of an analogy to demonstrate what this debate is all about. Finally, I came upon it. I asked my staff to go out and see if they could not find a nine foot belt. We…

As the gentleman says, this is about values. And if my colleagues believe in faith, family, work, thrift, and personal responsibility, the budget we are putting forward, where we are going to spend $9 trillion over the next 5 years, all we…

I appreciate the gentleman. And the whole issue of taxes, I know this sometimes drives some of our more liberal colleagues into orbit when you talk about tax relief, allowing people to keep more of their own money. Sometimes we have to…

I want to say a special congratulations and thanks to my colleague. I remember a couple of years ago when we first started having some joint town hall meetings. I represent Minnesota, he represents Wisconsin. When we first started talking…

This is a product that we can export anywhere in the world. Asia loves to buy more Spam. But when you devalue currencies, when you raise taxes, as the IMF is recommending to many of these economies, it really is the wrong prescription. It…

I think we should. My colleague mentioned several times about the old accounting standards and how we use Social Security to make the deficit look smaller. I think we need to talk about it. Because the truth of the matter is, and I think…

Those numbers are a little small to read. What it really says is that under the old policies of the past with higher taxes and more spending, the market was growing at about 18 percent, had grown about 18 percent. Since the American people…

I do not think the people back in Wisconsin or Minnesota, at least the common-sense people sitting around the coffee shops and the feed mills, I mean they would say this is crazy, especially when we are supposedly having a war on drugs. In…

Those are not our numbers. Those are from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. That even after the enormous tax increases of 1993, had we passed the President's budget, the red line represents how much the deficit was going up over…

We ought to use the same kind of accounting that every business uses and every family uses. Unfortunately, we are still stuck with the old accounting standards used by Washington since 1964. I might mention a lot of people, a lot of…

And my colleague and I were a very small fraternity then who believed not so much that we believed at what was being done in Congress, I think the real thing was we believed in the American people. The American people do not need a big…

One of my favorite quotes is from John Adams, and John Adams had something to do with writing our Constitution. And John Adams often said, ``Facts are stubborn things.'' And you have some charts which help demonstrate the facts.

Only in Washington, only in Washington dominated by the liberals would we have a birthday party, in effect, a anniversary party of the fifth anniversary of the largest tax increase in the history of the world. Only in Washington.

Nonetheless, let us talk about what it was like growing up in the 1950s. In the early 1950s, the average American family sent to Washington about 4 percent of their gross income. And I was really fortunate because my mom and dad could…

it is kind of comical to listen to some of our liberal friends debate the tax limitation amendment. They do not like it. They really do not like it. They do not like the idea that Congress must get a supermajority before passing…

I really think that for many years we labored under some unwritten law, if you will, that no good deed goes unpunished. If you worked you were punished, if you saved you were punished, if you invested you were punished, if you grew a…

I think sometimes we have to remind ourselves, and I know that my colleague was back in South Dakota and was probably watching some of the debates when we first got into this fight about balancing the budget and allowing families to keep…

Just for the Members who may not know, these are principally people born between the years 1917 and 1926. And there is almost something cynical about this. Most of my seniors are not particularly cynical people, but it does almost seem as…

nearly 2 years ago Congress approved landmark legislation giving farmers the freedom to farm. Supply management and command control agricultural policy had failed our farmers. The safety net that was intended was acting more like a…

I think sometimes when we talk about $5.5 trillion and $1.7 trillion and all of this interest and all of these numbers and all of these statistics, I think sometimes people do sort of tune out and they say, well, you know, that is…

I think we need to remind people what some of the cynics said. We originally came to Washington and said, you know, we are going to limit the growth of entitlements, we are going to cut domestic discretionary spending, we are going to put…

I think that is the wonderful thing. It is not just about welfare reform. It is also about Medicare reform. In fact, most Americans are not aware, again I am on the Committee on the Budget, the gentleman from Arizona is on the Committee on…

This is a chart that was put together by our colleague, the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Neumann). What it shows is the budget deficit. This actually is the debt. The accumulated debt was growing out of control. In fact, there was a study…

I just want to say that sometimes, as I said earlier, we talk about these issues, and we sound as if we are accountants, and we talk about numbers and statistics, but in the end, this is really about what kind of a country we are going to…

Unfortunately, it is time to mark the end of an era, and that era lasted only 2 years. On January 23, 1996, just 2 short years ago, the President declared in his State of the Union address that "the era of big government is over." Now it…