Charles W. Stenholm: “Let me just try to end it on the same positive note, and I appreciate the gentleman from Michigan's (Mr. Smith)…”

“Let me just try to end it on the same positive note, and I appreciate the gentleman from Michigan's (Mr. Smith) contribution to this tonight and the major points they made. We are not here to blame. That is not the point. We were here to point out we have got a problem. Now, you can explain it away all you want to about the various, and we can have our political stump speeches which we heard from the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Mario Diaz-Balart) a moment ago on that line. And that is great, but that does not change the fact that where we started with the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Taylor) is we are going to owe $13 trillion at the end of the 10-year period following the budget that you passed. Yes, we did not support it. I do not support it tonight. When you talk about spending our budget, the Blue Dog budget spent $400 billion less than the budget that you passed that you are so proud of, $400 billion on interest. Yes, we did not cut taxes as much as you did because we said, let us not cut them until we see whether there is money to cut them with. And that was before the war. After the war we said, we ought to be fiscally responsible and not borrow additional money. It will be the first time since 1812 that the United States Congress did not raise taxes in order to pay for a war. First time. But we are saying we ought to be conservative. And it is not conservative to move ahead as the direction you are moving.”