Mark Neumann: “reclaiming my time, I just had town hall meetings all over the State of Wisconsin, and one question I asked in Wisconsin…”

“reclaiming my time, I just had town hall meetings all over the State of Wisconsin, and one question I asked in Wisconsin was how many in this room think government spending should increase faster than the rate of inflation? We didn't get anybody who thought that. But look at what was going on out here, government spending going up at twice the rate of inflation. When we came in 1995, and we became the majority at that point, we had one idea. The idea was that instead of raising taxes on people we were going to get government spending under control. We were going to go after wasteful programs. Just one example my colleague from Michigan, I know, is very familiar with. We were spending $35 million of the taxpayers' money to Russia to launch monkeys into space to do research on the monkeys. We get here and find these sorts of programs, hundreds and hundreds of these sorts of programs, that were going on out here. We understood that if we could get to that waste and get government spending under control that we would both be able to balance the budget and lower taxes. That was the theory we came with. We came with the understanding that the 1993 solution of higher taxes was the wrong idea. We understood that the people did not want higher taxes; they wanted less wasteful government spending.”