Mark Neumann: “The budget agreement only projects a 4 percent growth. I think it is real important to see that 4 percent number next to…”

“The budget agreement only projects a 4 percent growth. I think it is real important to see that 4 percent number next to these numbers, what has actually been happening. It is very, very conservative. In fact, I asked the question, if revenues grow by 6 percent instead of 4, what happens? In fact we find that we have a balanced budget by the year 2000. We run a surplus in the year 2000. That is when the National Debt Repayment Act would kick in, two-thirds of that surplus goes to pay down the debt, one-third goes to reduce taxes even further for the American people. And that is what this is all about. I think maybe we should conclude or start to wrap this up by just kind of briefly going back through the past, the present and the future. I always use this chart to talk about the past because I think it says it better than anything else we have. During the late 1980's and early 1990's, the American people were promised a balanced budget. This blue line shows how it was supposed to work. Deficits exploded. In fact we did not follow the blue line. They never hit their targets. They said, in 1987, we will fix that. And they gave the American people another whole series of promises, and they never hit that target either. The American people got cynical. In 1993, they looked at this picture and they said, well, we sure cannot curtail the growth of government spending.…”