Bart Stupak: “In the 1993 budget vote, probably those of us who lived through it probably know it better than any of them, there were…”

“In the 1993 budget vote, probably those of us who lived through it probably know it better than any of them, there were 60 some Democrats who came in with me, and after that vote my class now has maybe 40 Democrats left. We lost about half our Democrats. It was a tough vote. We did raise taxes on those whose gross income was more than $180,000. I can tell my colleagues, in my district in northern Michigan, that is 1,170 families, with the money we taxed, those we asked to pay more, the higher income folks. Over 32,000 families in my district got the earned income tax credit that I spoke of a little earlier. So we taxed those, we asked those who could give us a little more to give it. We helped invest in our people. Since then the deficit has fallen dramatically. In fact, at the start of this year it was about $70 billion. When we close our books here on September 30, 1997, it will be approximately, some people predict, as low as $35 billion, basically no deficit whatsoever. So we have cut the deficit with the help of the President and just Democratic votes by over 90 percent in less than 5 years. We have the smallest deficits since 1980. And as a percentage of our gross domestic product, it is the smallest it has been since 1974. In fact, the deficit is less than 1 percent of our gross domestic product here in 1997. So if you take a look at it, this deficit reduction was based on the Democratic plan.”