Burgess Owens: “we have heard a lengthy discussion of the tax cut that will be on the floor tomorrow. It is very relevant to the subject…”

“we have heard a lengthy discussion of the tax cut that will be on the floor tomorrow. It is very relevant to the subject that I would like to discuss and that is the coming budget. It is all interwoven. You cannot separate one part from the other. The $17 billion in rescissions that have been passed by the House already, the tax cut tomorrow, the coming budget that we will deal with in May, all of it is interrelated and very complex. I wished there was some way to really simplify it so anybody could understand it without all of these lengthy discussions, but the discussion is necessary. The charts and the graphs, all of it is necessary but I think it could be summarized and we could take some guides to lead into an understanding of what is happening. There are a few basic facts that must be understood from the beginning and I want to start by explaining an interchange, a dialogue that I had with one of the speakers where I said that under Jimmy Carter the deficit was less than $100 billion and under Ronald Reagan it went up to $400 billion. I want to correct that. The deficit for one year under Jimmy Carter never exceeded $100 billion. I think the highest annual deficit that Jimmy Carter had in the budget was $64 or $68 billion. Under Ronald Reagan, it soared to an annual deficit of $400 billion. It all added up to, between the time Jimmy Carter left and the time Ronald Reagan left and the present, a $3 trillion difference.…”