Jim Saxton: “I just want to make a point here. I think this is very important, because I would not want any of our colleagues or…”

“I just want to make a point here. I think this is very important, because I would not want any of our colleagues or anybody who might be listening to this discussion to get the notion that we stand here talking about this ready to dismantle on a large scale Federal programs that are important to people. Two years ago, we began to slow the growth of some programs, which is what we still think we need to do in order to accomplish the objectives that we are talking about here tonight. We suggested, for example, that the School Lunch Program that was growing at a rate in excess of 10 percent, seems to me it was growing at something like 11.5 percent, every year we were spending 11.5 percent more than we had spent the year before, and we suggested that one way to begin to get a handle on the huge increases that we had seen in Federal spending that was driving this deficit and national debt problem would be to slow that growth rate down from about 11.5 percent, I think it was to about 7 percent. And we suggested similar kinds of things in many programs that had been growing at very high rates across the board. At the same time, during all those years, in real terms, we were reducing defense spending. So we had a disproportionate increase in some programs and no growth at all in other programs.”