Tim Walz: “Absolutely. And this issue again comes back to the basic core principles of budgeting. I would just like to refer to the…”

“Absolutely. And this issue again comes back to the basic core principles of budgeting. I would just like to refer to the chart here for a moment. Whenever you make a budget and whenever we sit down in this body, we have to determine what our values are, what our priorities are, put them in order, and pay for them accordingly. The President has indicated that this is simply too expensive, that we cannot do it. Now, to keep in mind, I want to give an illustration here. The cost of a day in Iraq in the war is about $33 million. To get an idea, that is about a quarter of a million children we could cover. For 37 days, just over a month of what this war is costing us, and this number doesn't include, by the way, soldiers' salaries nor the health care costs that, it was estimated in a hearing I was at today, are going to cost us somewhere in the neighborhood of $9 billion a year, probably stretching, with the total cost coming from CBO and the Congressional Research Service, to $1.3 trillion over the next 15 years. We could cover all 10 million kids. So we have got a decision to make in this country, where we are going to put our resources, where we are going to invest, where we are going to see the future on this. And this is a simple decision.”