On the recordJanuary 24, 2012
I would like to thank the gentleman from Wisconsin for yielding and also for his leadership on budget issues. Mr. Speaker, 1,000 days without a budget and then 2 days ago we received news that the President is going to miss his deadline for submitting a budget to Congress. Rather than urging Senate Democrats to pass a budget and work with us to solve our Nation's fiscal problems, President Obama has joined them in failing to do their job. America deserves better than this. Families and businesses set budgets every day. How much money do we have? What can we afford? What do we have to go without? In Washington, we have an obligation to ask and to answer those same questions. As I learned operating a small business, failing to plan is planning to fail. Now, 17 years ago when I lost my job in a corporate merger, my wife and I sat down around the kitchen table, made a pot of coffee and got out a sheet of notebook paper, drew a line down the middle and on the left side we wrote this is how much we have, on the right side how we were going to spend it. That's a budget. Americans are sitting around their kitchen tables every night, and they have every reason to expect their government in Washington to do the same thing. In the House, we passed a serious budget last year, and we're committed to do so again this year. It's time for the President and the Democrats in the Senate to do the same.
