Political Quotes

“I rise in support of the Lott amendment and to address briefly at this time the budget as presented by the President. If you look at the budget presented by the President, it is, regrettably, a budget that is really a stand-pat budget on the issue of addressing the budget deficit. It does not move forward the issue of reducing the deficit. It says that last year we passed a lot of taxes and, therefore, under the context of what the President believes, we should be able to reduce the deficit this year. It is not a visionary proposal but vision-impaired proposal. If you look at the numbers in the outyear, we cannot afford to do nothing on the issue of the budget deficit. This chart reflects what is happening to the budget and the deficit over the coming years. As you can see from the lines here, the green line, which is the bottom line, is the deficit. Although it flattens out over the next few years and goes down, it rises as we head into the next decade. The reason it starts to rise is because entitlement expenditures, which have been explained a number of times on this floor, increase dramatically. So the practical effect is that if we do not start addressing this entitlement line today, we are not going to get in place any significant budget reduction in the deficit in the outyears.”