Byron Dorgan: “we had talked about trying to have a block of time to talk about the economy. The reason we wanted to do that is because…”

“we had talked about trying to have a block of time to talk about the economy. The reason we wanted to do that is because this is very important. This is the question that most people in this country ask themselves, and families reflect on this: Is this country moving in the right direction or the wrong direction? Are we on the right track, or are we on the wrong road? Those are the questions people ask. We are not here suggesting that everything is wonderful in America. We have a country that faces a lot of challenges. There is no question about that. But we have a country that has gone through an immediate past period causing significant problems, requiring significant remedies, but a country that has begun to address those things head-on. I want to take us back just a bit to a new President that came to town, who said, ``I have a new idea. I have consulted with a man named Laffer, an economist, who has a new graph and curve, the Laffer curve.'' The Laffer curve says that, if you give folks at the upper end of the income brackets big tax cuts, you actually collect more money because it will filter down and everybody at the bottom will get damp. That is trickle-down economics. So there were big, big tax cuts given, especially to the people at the top. The result was that we ran into massive deficits, unparalleled in the history of this country--massive budget deficits. The rich got richer, the people at the top, during that period.…”