Kay Bailey Hutchison: “Since the Senator brought up the President's budget and the inability of Congress to deal with this issue in the past, I…”

“Since the Senator brought up the President's budget and the inability of Congress to deal with this issue in the past, I should say that the budget did come out today from the President, who promised to cut the deficit in half, and it actually spends $200 billion more than we have in revenue this year. After the Clinton administration is over, he will have added $800 billion to the national debt. The debt today is about $4.7 trillion. That is $18,500 for every man, woman and child in this country. So every baby that is born can be welcomed into our country knowing that that poor baby has an $18,500 debt hanging over his or her head the minute he or she comes into the world. They talk about not putting it in the Constitution and yet as recently as today, a budget is submitted that is again not in balance. I think it is time for us to say enough is enough. They talk about the sky is falling if this is passed, but do they realize what we are going to have to do to get to a balanced budget by the year 2002? According to the Joint Economic Committee, we can balance the budget without cutting Social Security or Medicare and permitting Medicaid to grow by 5 percent if we just limit the growth of all other programs to 2 percent a year--that's the growth, not current spending. If we exempt only Social Security, we can balance the budget in 6 years by cutting projected spending by 4 cents on the dollar. We are talking about limiting the amount of growth.…”