Judd Gregg: “This bill has a lot of substantive problems. It probably will aggravate food consumption for nations around the world…”

“This bill has a lot of substantive problems. It probably will aggravate food consumption for nations around the world, their ability to produce product, and certainly dramatically increase the cost of product in the United States. It perverts the marketplace so a product that might be produced more efficiently would not be produced more efficiently. It spends a heck of a lot of money, $289 billion. As we have seen, once again, it uses all sorts of budget gimmicks-- when it was originally passed, and it will have to be replaced, or parts of it will because of the bureaucratic snafu--to get around the rules of the Senate and the House, for that matter, in the area of trying to discipline spending. There is $18 billion worth of budget gimmicks in this bill. Then we just had a new budget avoidance exercise when the chairman of the Budget Committee declared that the new baseline under a new budget--this bill would have violated the original baseline, as was in that new budget--will now be adjusted so this bill would not violate that baseline--another exercise, unfortunately, in gaming the pay-go rules.”