Kent Conrad: “I wish now to turn to the Gregg amendment that was previously offered with respect to a $1 trillion cap. Let me indicate…”

“I wish now to turn to the Gregg amendment that was previously offered with respect to a $1 trillion cap. Let me indicate that the spending in the budget resolution that has gone to the conference committee takes spending down as a share of GDP each and every year from 20.8 percent of GDP in 2008 and 2009, every year stepping it down until we get to 19.1 percent of GDP in 2012 and 2013. I might add, we balance the budget in 2012 and 2013 under the budget. The comparison of the spending under the resolution and the President's budget is depicted by these lines: The green line is the budget resolution spending line; the President's is the red line. You can see almost no difference. That is because there is almost no difference between the spending in the President's budget and the spending in the Senate budget resolution. In fact, here are the differences: The Senate budget resolution has $3.08 trillion of spending over the period of the 5 years. The President has $3.84 trillion of spending over the period. What are the differences? Let me indicate as a percentage, that is a 1-percent difference--1 percent. Why do we have 1 percent more than the President? Well, because first we rejected his Medicare cuts. That is 45 percent of the difference. Forty-three percent of the difference is we rejected his cuts to law enforcement. We rejected his cut to veterans. We rejected his cuts to transportation. My goodness. We just had a bridge collapse in Minnesota, 35W.…”