David Obey: “I think we ought to call a spade a spade here today and recognize what is happening. The majority party in 1995 tried to…”

“I think we ought to call a spade a spade here today and recognize what is happening. The majority party in 1995 tried to shut down the government in order to force President Clinton to cut $270 billion out of Medicare and to make deep cuts in education and health care and a number of other domestic programs just to finance huge tax cuts which were primarily aimed at the highest income Americans. You got burned. Since then, you have been a little shy about attacking education. We have seen charts today that brag about what the Republican Party has done to raise Pell Grants. This chart shows in the blue graphs what the President has asked for in Pell Grants since 1985. The red chart shows what the Republicans have provided, or what the Congress has provided. As you can see, it has been the presidential demand that has driven the number up each year, except for 2 years when the President asked for more money and the majority party one-upped him by a tiny amount of money. So it has been the President driving this upward increase in Pell Grants. The question is not so much what you did yesterday; it is what you are going to do today and tomorrow. In 1976, Pell Grants paid for over 70 percent of the cost of sending a working family's kid to college. Today it pays for less than 40 percent. We think now that we have surpluses instead of deficits we ought to do something about that.”