Charles W. Stenholm: “3 years ago is when this debate began and those of us that believed that we had a little better plan, we lost that…”

“3 years ago is when this debate began and those of us that believed that we had a little better plan, we lost that battle; and today, we are still fighting the same battle we did 3 years ago. We were told if we instigated the tax cuts that we would balance the budget in 4 years. It did not work out quite that way. We cannot argue with the fact that the budget, that is somewhere out there in never-never land between the House and the Senate, includes an increasing of the debt ceiling, the amount which this country can borrow, to over $8 trillion. In the last 2 rac{1}{2} years, we have borrowed $1 trillion. In the next year and a half, we are going to borrow in excess of another $1.5 trillion. We cannot escape that those are the facts. We all know the reason why. This amendment today just suggests that this generation ought to be doing some of the paying rather than just blindly following a theory that does not work, the theory that we can balance the budget by cutting the amount of revenue when we are at war. This is the first war in the history of our country that we have fought by cutting taxes, and the results are predictable.”