NAN A. S. HAYWORTH: “let me let the gentleman in on a little secret. The gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Terry) asks a very pertinent question…”

“let me let the gentleman in on a little secret. The gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Terry) asks a very pertinent question, and given the curious mathematics of Washington, let us point out at the outset that we could take every economist in the world, lay them end to end, and still never reach a conclusion. But part of the peculiarities of the way in which we practice accounting in Washington, D.C. is with a bias towards spending. We call it static scoring. That is to say, we fail to take into account the history that we have seen for the better part of close to 50 years in the United States. For example, and again I am glad to stand here in this portion of the well, because we can point to a Democratic chief executive, John F. Kennedy, who in the 1960s cut taxes across the board. This is an approach that was reaffirmed by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and by our own current President, George W. Bush, just 1 year ago. The premise, as it has turned out, and check the numbers, as we say in baseball, you could look it up, revenues to the government actually increase when you cut taxes across the board. If we cut taxes on these millions of American families, I have every confidence that, in the long term, revenues to the government will increase, because money is being put to work on behalf of these families.”