Mark Kennedy: “I would just say we are for reducing the debt. We did pay down $453 billion of debt from 1998 to 2001. We are for having…”

“I would just say we are for reducing the debt. We did pay down $453 billion of debt from 1998 to 2001. We are for having that deficit come down. How did it get there? Eighty percent of the change from where we were when we had surplus and where we find ourselves with the projections now is driven by the economy. So are we just going to assume that we do not have an ability to get that economy rolling forward, again? We could, we believed, by spurring the economy through tax relief. We spend a lot of time talking about the government's budget today, and we have not talked about the families' budget and the aggregate of the families' budget in terms of national economy. And when you look at Reagan tax relief after he passed that tax relief, we had a 60 percent increase in tax revenue. If we get the economy picking up like we are hoping to with 25 percent increase in the stock market in the recent past, that can get that deficit paid off sooner rather than later. As a person who spent a lot of time balancing budgets, a person who was on the finance side of business for 20 years, as a retailer, when we face a tough economy, what did we do? Did we raise prices? Yes, this may be the first time since 1812 or whatever, but the last time anybody tried to raised taxes during a depression was Calvin Coolidge, and I do not think we necessarily want to follow that example. We need to, as a retailer would, say how can we lower the costs in the economy? That is what we have done.”