Kent Conrad: “Every single time I have heard our friends on the other side claim the Democratic amendments to the Budget Resolution…”

“Every single time I have heard our friends on the other side claim the Democratic amendments to the Budget Resolution would have increased the deficit, it is absolutely false. Go back and read the amendments. The deficits would have been reduced under our amendments because we provided fully the offsets for each of those amendments. We can go down the list. In fact, I had an amendment to fund IDEA and completely paid for it. Senator Lautenberg had an amendment restoring the defense cuts. Members will recall, there were defense cuts last year. Senator Lautenberg fully funded defense and provided the money to do so. On homeland security, there were increases offered to better protect the country. It was fully paid for, plus an amount for deficit reduction. Every single amendment was fully paid for. Accumulate the totals, it is $687 billion of deficit reduction. Our friends on the other side talked about the record on deficit reduction. I am glad he did because here is what has happened to the deficits over time. We can see on this chart going back to 1969, the last time we had record deficits was in the administration of the previous President Bush. President Clinton came in 1992, and we can see the deficit went down each and every year until we were back in surplus. It was only when this new Republican President took office that we again went back into deficits and now have gone into record deficit territory, the biggest deficits in the history of the country.”