Richard Gephardt: “I rise to vote and speak against this conference report and ask Members on both sides of the aisles to do the same…”

“I rise to vote and speak against this conference report and ask Members on both sides of the aisles to do the same thing. This is not a good budget for America. We did not get to vote the other night because we did not have two pages, but now that we have seen all of the pages, the problem was not the lack of the right pages. The problem with this budget is that it does not have the right numbers. It does not fulfill the priorities of the American people. It is a budget that is deficient in terms of fiscal responsibility and in terms of the right priorities that I think people have. In many ways, this budget is a definition of what we want the country to be in the next 10 years. So it is a momentous decision that we are making. I believe this is a day that we give up on fiscal responsibility. I thoroughly believe that if this budget is followed, that in the days ahead we will return to deficits. First of all, there is no cushion. The cushion that looks like is here is not here, and when the tax cuts go up, as they inevitably will, when other tax cuts that are not contemplated in this budget are actually passed, the deficits will start. We will invade Social Security and Medicare, which we said we did not want to do. We have had innumerable votes here on lockboxes, but I predict that if this budget is passed we will be into Social Security and Medicare. This is the day that we return to high deficits and high interest rates.”