Judd Gregg: “I yield myself--the Senator from North Dakota and the Senator from Maryland took about a half an hour. I took about 5…”

“I yield myself--the Senator from North Dakota and the Senator from Maryland took about a half an hour. I took about 5 minutes. So I am going to yield myself 25 minutes to discuss this issue in some depth because it is an important issue. I do believe the characterizations here are interesting but inconsistent with the facts. The Senator from North Dakota says we are running up the debt. I suppose you can argue that is true, yes, because we are operating the Government. But the second question would be, Who is running up the size of the Government? That would be probably a more appropriate question. If you look at the Democratic proposals, as they have hit the floor of the Senate, they are running up the size of the Government. That is their goal. They proposed amendments in committee that increase the size of the Federal Government by $127 billion. That is a huge expansion of the Federal Government. I give them credit, they pay for it with taxes on the American people, raising them $133 billion. And they are not tax- loophole closers. The Senator from North Dakota has claimed: Well, if you just collected taxes that are owed, you might get up to $100 billion. That may or may not be true, and we are going to try to do something to accomplish that. But as he well knows, CBO will not score that. They score that as zero.…”