Pete Domenici: “The Senator would make a point that at this point in history the budget starts turning down, and it would have gone up…”

“The Senator would make a point that at this point in history the budget starts turning down, and it would have gone up; and, therefore, President Bill Clinton has done a masterful job of controlling the expenditures of our country and being fiscally responsible. Let us just look. This is not me. This says the Congressional Budget Office. It is not the Senator from New Mexico. We asked them, what did this? How did this happen? Lo and behold, here is what they said: Taxes were raised, and that made up 38.3 percent of getting this down. So the American people right off should know, yes, the Democrats got the deficit down. And 38 percent was because they increased taxes. Most interesting, 50 percent--50 percent--of this reduction, from this line to this line, had nothing whatsoever to do with any action by anyone. They are merely reestimates of the expenditure of Government to adjust them to the reality instead of the estimate, such things as the savings and loan fund to pay for the bailout. We overestimated the amount of money, and it was sitting there in the budget, a huge amount of money. I cannot believe that anybody is going to claim that the President did that or the Democrats, by voting for a tax-loaded budget-deficit package, did that. That is a huge amount of money. Others are estimates in the expenditure costs of programs. The estimated increases did not come out as high as the budget projected. I must say, in all deference, it did not matter who was elected President.”