Charles W. Stenholm: “I want to continue on the general thesis of the concern that many of us have on this side of the aisle, that we…”

“I want to continue on the general thesis of the concern that many of us have on this side of the aisle, that we seemingly have forgotten about budgets and balanced budgets and we seem to not be willing to talk about the deficits that are now occurring. That is very alarming. As you know, last year this body passed a budget, an economic game plan. There seems to be a great reluctance to change that plan, which means that we are now willingly going to be endorsing deficits as far as the eye can see. We on this side on the Blue Dog Caucus have repeatedly offered to work in a bipartisan way with our friends on the other side of the aisle and with the administration to come up with a new budget plan. But there seems to be no desire whatsoever to do so. We now are very concerned, because at the end of this month the few remaining budget rules that have worked fairly good over the most recent period of time when we did achieve a balanced budget, pay-go, simply saying if you are going to increase spending you have got to find some cut somewhere else, expire.”