Marshall Sanford: “it is interesting that if one looks at the polls today, for the first time in American history when folks were asked: do…”

“it is interesting that if one looks at the polls today, for the first time in American history when folks were asked: do you think your children will do better off or worse off than you did, they are answering ``worse off.'' That is the absolute opposite of the American dream, because the American dream is built on the idea that I did this well, my father did a little bit poorer than that, and my children are going to be doing better than that. One cannot build a civilization, one cannot build a country around the idea that my children are going to do worse off then I did. So I think at the core of this debate and the core of this budget, what we are really talking about is the American dream. Mr. Chairman, I would say second what those polls show is that Americans at the gut level understand what history has well documented over the course of time. Rome fell in 476 after controlling essentially the entire known world. The Byzantine empire, the Italian renaissance came to an end, the Spanish empire came to an end, the Dutch empire came to an end, the Ottomon empire came to an end. A host of civilizations came to an end because everyone of them reached a crossroads wherein they had to decide: Do we go back to what made us competitive and a world power in the first place, or we stay on this cozy but ultimately unsustainable cycle of upward government spending and upward government taxation? We are at that same crossroads today.”