Timothy Penny: “I compliment the gentleman from Colorado for his work in developing this package of spending cuts. As he just described…”

“I compliment the gentleman from Colorado for his work in developing this package of spending cuts. As he just described, this proposal represents 550 billion dollar's worth of spending reductions over the next 5 years. That gets us much the way toward a balanced budget, and that certainly ought to be our goal here as national policymakers. I also want to agree with his observation that in order to come up with the spending cuts required to balance this budget, we all have to swallow hard because there is no easy package. In this instance, there are individual items in this package that may not be terribly popular in Colorado or in Minnesota, but we have to challenge our constituents to look at the larger needs, reducing the deficit by $550 billion, even though it includes some sacrifice on the part of the constituents of the gentleman from Colorado and on the part of my constituents in Minnesota, that is what we have to be willing to endorse if we want to ultimately solve this problem.”