John Cornyn: “my colleagues from the majority want to spend $23 billion above what the President has requested in his budget for…”

“my colleagues from the majority want to spend $23 billion above what the President has requested in his budget for discretionary spending. Now, that is $23 billion in discretionary spending over and above entitlement spending, which has been operating again on autopilot at the growth rate of about 8 percent per year. They have claimed $23 billion is not all that much money. But I would suggest that only in Washington is $23 billion to be considered pocket change. The American people are smarter than that. They know somebody has to pay for that money. It does not magically appear. What it means is the Federal Government is going to reach into their pockets and extract it from their hard-earned wages in order to fund these vast expansions of Government programs. We need to make sure that we are better stewards of the taxpayers' dollars and that we regain the lost confidence the American people had in this institution. We need to take care of problems, for example, such as the growing alternative minimum tax, which threatens to grow from 6 million taxpayers this year to 23 million taxpayers next year--a typical so-called tax-the-rich program, which, just as they always do, tends to grow to creep into the middle class. We need to make sure the middle class does not suffer a huge tax increase by dealing with the alternative minimum tax.”