David Obey: “What we have going on here, in my judgment, is Operation Diversion. You have a bunch of people in this House who are…”

“What we have going on here, in my judgment, is Operation Diversion. You have a bunch of people in this House who are perfectly comfortable with the fact that the tax policies that they have voted for will deliver $57 billion in tax cuts this year to people who make over a million dollars a year. That is five times as much money as the increase that we have in this bill above the President's request. And you have people who have voted for the war in Iraq, which has spent $600 billion in a case of mistaken identity as they mistook the stocky guy with the mustache, Saddam Hussein, for the tall guy with the beard, Osama bin Laden, and that mistake has cost us $600 billion when you take into account the President's newest request. That is 60 times as much as the addition we have above the President's budget for these programs. They voted for all of that, and now they want to scramble away from the deficits and the debt that that has produced. And they try to divert the attention of the public and say, oh, the real cause of our fiscal mess is the fact that these crazy Democrats are trying to put more money into education and more money into health care and more money into job training. Well, I plead fully guilty. We are trying to do that because yes, we do believe that these are investments. We think that kids are better off if you put more money into education than if you take it away.”