Political Quotes

“I think we have become all too accustomed, in the debates dealing with the budget in recent years, to hearing claims that are exaggerated, partial statements of the facts, and on occasion outright misstatements of facts. Yesterday's debate, though thankfully it was not acrimonious--many of these budgetary debates are in that category--was liberally seasoned, I might say, with budgetary hyperbole, would be the charitable way to describe some of the observations that I heard yesterday. Let me take just a moment to set the record straight on a few of the assertions that struck me as being somewhat most egregious and then on a couple of lesser statements that I shall call imprecisions. First, the charge was made that the Congressional Budget Office has revised its deficit baseline upward by $100 billion and, so this claim goes, the pending budget resolution is unduly optimistic by that amount. Both portions of this charge are simply inaccurate and untrue. The Congressional Budget Office's April reestimate of the President's budget contains an upward deficit revision of roughly $30 billion for 1995 through 1999--$30 billion over a 4-year period instead of the $100 billion that was claimed here.”