Judd Gregg: “here is the problem. The budget before us does absolutely nothing in the area of addressing entitlement reform and…”

“here is the problem. The budget before us does absolutely nothing in the area of addressing entitlement reform and savings and does a significant amount of spending money, a significant amount of tax increases. It raises the tax burden of the American people from its historic level 18.2 percent up to 20 percent. It raises taxes by hundreds of billions of dollars. It raises spending by tens of billions of dollars but does not address the most fundamental issue we face as a nation, which is the pending financial meltdown of this country as a result of the baby boom generation retiring, and our children cannot afford the costs. The Senator from Texas is right, there are zero savings on the mandatory side of this budget. When the chairman gets up and says there is $15 billion of savings, he forgot to finish the sentence. There is $30 billion of spending. So actually there is a net loss on the entitlement side for the proposed budget. That has been adjusted by the amendment of Senator Baucus, so it is now basically a wash where we have no savings, $15 billion of savings, $15 billion of new spending in entitlement programs. So there is a zero on that account.”