Blake Moore: “Thank you for yielding, gentleman, and thank you for putting together this Special Order. I can tell you that it has…”

“Thank you for yielding, gentleman, and thank you for putting together this Special Order. I can tell you that it has been very distressing to watch the progress of this budget being put together for the American people. And part of the distress I think is because of the sort of psychological warfare that is being committed here. I think that the Orwellian way that the budget is being presented--it's being presented as we have got to make draconian cuts in the budget in order to heal our fledgling economy, and especially, we have to so-called ``reform'' our entitlements programs in order to maintain them for the future. There has been a call for an adult conversation about this, a call for the facts and for the truth, and no accounting gimmicks and no gimmickry in this discussion of reforming entitlement programs. Democrats are admonished not to scare seniors with entitlement reform and to demagogue the issue, and yet what we have seen from the Republicans are these fire engine red colorful charts warning us of the burden that the aging baby boomers will impose upon the hapless taxpayer unless we adopt the so-called austere ``path to prosperity,'' which ends the entitlement to Medicaid, caps those benefits, which turns Medicare into a voucher--so-called ``premium supports''--and which gives instruction to the Ways and Means Committee to privatize or to fix Social Security.…”