David Price: “the Republican pay-as-you- go proposal makes no fiscal sense. Leaving revenues out of the picture is like trying to fill…”

“the Republican pay-as-you- go proposal makes no fiscal sense. Leaving revenues out of the picture is like trying to fill a bucket with a gaping hole in it. It simply will not work. We did it right in 1990 when Congress and the President came together on a bipartisan basis and undertook a courageous effort to balance the Federal budget. Integral to this effort was a real pay-as-you-go rule that controlled both spending and tax cuts. The result was budget discipline that worked, and eventually the first budget surplus in decades. Deficits are not caused by discretionary spending alone or by entitlement spending alone or by revenue shortfalls alone. All three elements contribute. And it is folly to pretend that fiscal balance can be attained without addressing all three. Mr. Chairman, we could cut every last dime of domestic discretionary spending; we could eliminate funding for education, highways, health research, veterans health care, the environment and all the rest of the domestic discretionary budget and we would still run a deficit. Why? Because we have enacted trillions of dollars in tax cuts mainly benefiting our country's wealthiest people. And we have not paid for them. The President and this Congress have defied the budget rules. They have abandoned fiscal sanity. The result is deficits now approaching $500 billion a year. And far from correcting this folly, this Republican budget reform bill would actually codify it. This bill is a sham. I know it.…”