Peter Hoagland: “as we wrestle with this difficult decision today, trying to balance the interests of the taxpayers against the interests…”

“as we wrestle with this difficult decision today, trying to balance the interests of the taxpayers against the interests of Californians who so desperately need relief, I think we first need to recall the tremendous progress we have made in deficit reduction in the last year and a half. Nineteen months ago we were running a deficit at the rate of $331 billion a year. It is now expected the deficit for the next fiscal year will be below $200 billion. Many decisions made in this body, on the floor of this House, were responsible for bringing that deficit down. We can be proud of that, and we should be proud of that. We are making more progress in deficit reduction than we had made since the Truman administration, as the President indicated the other day during his State of the Union Address. So today let us not forget what tremendous progress we have made. Let us also not forget the plight of those Californians. I will not argue that. I am not from California. Others will deal with that issue much more effectively than I can. But clearly we have had a disaster of major proportions and we need to attend to it. I intend to vote for this supplemental appropriations today because I believe we simply have got to get those funds out to those people as quickly as we can. I think we should go ahead as quickly as we can. I think we should go ahead and invoke our emergency powers to do that.”