Maurice Hinchey: “a few moments ago the distinguished majority leader, the gentleman from Texas, made the assertion at that podium that…”

“a few moments ago the distinguished majority leader, the gentleman from Texas, made the assertion at that podium that often in an election year the first casualty is truth; and then, over the course of the next several minutes, he went on to prove that, at least in some cases, that assertion can be true. He asserted that a couple of years after President Clinton and Vice President Gore took office, the budget deficit was still $200 billion. You can hurt the truth and kill the truth by acts of omission as well as commission, and that is what happened in that particular case. What he failed to observe was that when President Clinton and Vice President Gore came to the White House, the annual budget deficit that year was almost $300 billion; and so, yes, a couple of years later it was already reduced by $100 billion, and it was continuing to go down. He used the phrase 'budget deficits as far as the eye could see.' That is a phrase that was coined by the Office of Management and Budget, the Budget Director, of the outgoing Bush Administration, and the outgoing Bush Administration predicted that under the policies of former President Bush, that the deficit today would be $445 or $450 billion.”