Marshall Sanford: “in this whole debate about the budget, I would remind everybody that Mother's Day was this weekend. One of my mother's…”

“in this whole debate about the budget, I would remind everybody that Mother's Day was this weekend. One of my mother's sayings was that too much of a good thing is actually a bad thing. Benjamin Franklin said, ``I would rather urge moderation in all things,'' and farmers back in my district had this saying that you can only squeeze but so much blood out of a turnip. What these sayings say, I guess, is a word of support for a recent Joint Economic Committee study entitled ``The Impact of the Welfare State on the American Economy,'' by Lowell Gallaway and Richard Vedder. Its findings were highlighted in a recent Investors Business Daily article entitled ``Cut to Grow.'' What both the report said and what the article said was that there is a price tag to Government spending. If you look at this chart, that price tag is that you can only go so far before Government spending becomes a problem. Keynes was right up to a point that Government spending creates economic activity, up until about this 17.6 percent that the chairman alluded to, and then beyond that it is actually detrimental. Beyond that it is actually a drag on the economy. Mr. Chairman, here we are at about 22 percent of the size of our economy right now with Government spending, and what that means is that it is actually hurting us.”