Mark Neumann: “If I could just interrupt briefly here, the good news is that we can do this without any dramatic changes in the overall…”

“If I could just interrupt briefly here, the good news is that we can do this without any dramatic changes in the overall budget process. I had some people in our conference even say to me, where are you going to get that extra money from. The reality is, because the economy is doing better than was originally anticipated, if we put the exact same budget on the floor of the House of Representatives that passed through here last year, it already got enough votes to pass. If we put that same bill on the floor, we can at least start setting aside the principal in the Social Security trust fund without doing anything different than we did before. Why is that? That is because the economy is performing better than was anticipated last March. So the difference between the March and January, where we are at right now today because the economy is doing better, if we pass the same spending levels that we had last year, we will in fact be able to put the Social Security trust fund aside without doing any additional cuts. What we are really saying is that that additional revenue that is being generated because the economy is doing better, we just cannot go and spend that money on other wasteful Washington spending.”