Vicky Hartzler: “Thank you, Renee. We certainly appreciate your hosting this today, and I certainly am glad to lend my support for a…”

“Thank you, Renee. We certainly appreciate your hosting this today, and I certainly am glad to lend my support for a balanced budget amendment. It goes back to my childhood. I've shared this before, but I wanted to share this again because this is what I grew up with, and I believe it's what most Americans grew up with. I grew up on a farm, and it was just my mom and my dad and my sister and me. And every January my mom would get out all these ledger papers and lay them out on the kitchen table. That was before the days of the computers. Each page represented a month. And she and my dad would spend days, literally, charting out the cash flow for our farm for the rest of the year. And they would try to estimate how much the yield was going to be on the corn and the soybeans, and they had to guess how much the price was going to be, and they researched the cost of the seed and the other inputs and the fuel, and they charted that all out, and then our mortgage payments. They were able to, through working that pencil and erasing and reworking it, figure out how they were going to make everything work, how they were going to be able to live within their means. It wasn't always easy, but as the years went on and conditions changed, Mother would get that eraser out and she would readjust that cash flow to make sure that we stayed in balance, make sure that we had everything that we needed. And that's just common sense. That's families balancing their budget.…”