Mark Neumann: “When we came here, many of our colleagues tonight are playing basketball, so this is no pun intended. There is a good…”

“When we came here, many of our colleagues tonight are playing basketball, so this is no pun intended. There is a good spirited basketball charity game going on out here tonight, but if we had all played basketball and not done our job, this shows what would have happened to the deficit. This is the deficit stream that we inherited in 1995 when we came here. Remember 1993 was that big tax increase where they were going to try to get this under control. Even after that big tax increase, this is what we inherited in 1995 when I was first elected to office. The gentleman is right. It was going all the way up to $350 billion, if we did not do something about it. This is our 12 months work. Our first year, 1995, our 12 months in office, we brought the projected deficit down to this yellow line. But at the same time we laid this green line into place. And just like we had done before, we made a promise to the American people that we would get to a balanced budget. Only this group is very different. Before 1995, every time those promises were broke. But we made a promise, too. It is this green line on the chart. The blue line is what we are actually doing. I think it is so significant. We are now in the third year of a 7-year plan to balance the budget but instead of the broken promises before 1995, we are not only on track, we are ahead of schedule to the point where we will get it done next year.”