Joe Cunningham: “Alan Greenspan has told us that we dare not break the budget caps, that the growing economy, interest rates, low…”

“Alan Greenspan has told us that we dare not break the budget caps, that the growing economy, interest rates, low inflation are because of that, that the balanced budget is a very important document that we bipartisanly worked on in this House. But if my colleagues take a look, we pay nearly a billion dollars a day on just the interest of the debt. That is before we pay for anything, one area. Now some of us feel that those offsets, some offsets are good, but one cannot find any offsets in this body that people will agree on that is not painful, should it be National Endowment for the Arts, should it be AmeriCorps that costs $27,000 per volunteer, should it be such things as bilingual education, which over 72 percent of Californians want to get rid of because we are last in literacy, it has been in effect all this time. But regardless, it is difficult, and we are going to have to make those kinds of decisions, but we feel that instead of going ahead and spending the money, which when we did not have the majority was the case for 30 years that put us into debt, then we have got to offset these and it is going to be painful. I disagree with my own side on the housing issue; I think that is one area where we need to invest, but I would also say that Somalia was put there by the White House.…”