Bill Bennett: “Fact No. 1: Money does not come from the budget. I know that comes as a great surprise to this body, but money comes…”

“Fact No. 1: Money does not come from the budget. I know that comes as a great surprise to this body, but money comes from the economy, and if the economy is growing and vibrant, there is lots of money in the Treasury. If the economy is shrinking or depressed it does not matter how much the budget projected would be there, it will not be there. So the one thing that frustrates me the most, coming from the business world into the Congress, is this insistence upon making projections, all neat and balanced down to the last dollar, and then assuming that is the way things will turn out. It is like a businessman who says at the beginning of the year, ``I project we will have so much revenue from our business this year. Accordingly, I will adopt a budget for x amount to spend that much revenue.'' I have been in that circumstance. We made projections for a business that I was CEO of. As it turned out, we fell 10 percent short of our projections. That should not bother too many people. Ten percent is not that much money.…”