David Obey: “what this is about is very simple. It is about giving away goodies without having found a way to pay for them. We have…”

“what this is about is very simple. It is about giving away goodies without having found a way to pay for them. We have seen time and time again that our Republican friends in this Congress want to propose to cut taxes for the wealthy and for special interests. It has been their No. 1 priority. The problem is that they keep running into a situation in which the commonsense budget rules require them to pay for any tax reductions that they provide. We saw last year how the Republicans would like to pay for those tax breaks. They wanted to cut Medicare, they wanted to cut education, they wanted to cut school lunches; the American people objected. And so now what are we back to? We are back to the resurrection of the David Stockman rosy scenario business. I would remind my colleagues what happened the last time the country used dynamic scoring. We were promised by David Stockman, who ran the budget office for President Reagan, that if we passed his magic budget which cut taxes and raised defense spending, we would cut our deficit from $55 billion to zero within 4 years. Instead, using his dynamic scoring, that deficit went up from $55 billion to $208 billion, and finally they shaved it a bit to $185 billion. I would simply suggest, if we were not paying for the added deficits that were added during those Reagan years, this budget would be in balance right now.”