Paul Ryan

I say this regretfully, but this bill is an absence of leadership. This bill shows that we're not leading, that America is not leading, that the new majority is not leading. Why do I say that? The new majority brought this bill to the…

First off, Mr. Speaker, I would like to celebrate the fact that we are here in this well talking about this motion to go to conference, and I want to compliment our chairman of the Budget Committee, Mr. Spratt, the gentleman from South…

I simply want to applaud the gentleman, I want to applaud him for coming up with a creative, innovative, idea to get these rules back to the world of common sense. Then we could actually go after wasteful spending, we actually save the…

I thought, given the comments recently by our majority leader about this year's budget, it would be fitting to go through the budget that we're talking about. The majority leader just said, in one of the publications printed here, that we…

I have explained this to constituents at home in Wisconsin and they are just dumbfounded. They think that if you come to the floor and bring an amendment to eliminate wasteful spending, let's just say we did an amendment to get rid of the…

Does the gentleman remember when we had a markup where the budget was written in the Budget Committee, and we had 36 amendments? Remember the different kinds of amendments we had, and the votes, we had votes on whether or not it's right to…

That's right. And what the majority is basically proposing is they are going to deem this budget resolution. They are going to simply say that this is the resolution that we deem to be the case, and this is how we are going to manage the…

why are we here? We're here because it's Tax Day and the majority decided they had to have a tax bill to come to the floor to pass on Tax Day. There are some good provisions in this bill. I want to talk about one provision that is not a…

As the gentleman knows, this is their money, and if they choose to withdraw their money for non-health care reasons, they pay taxes.

I want to start off by complimenting the chairman of the committee and the ranking member of the committee, along with all the other members of the Foreign Affairs Committee for working in a bipartisan way to put together this compromise…

if there was ever an equivalent of what we call a no-brainer in Congress, it is the Colombian Free Trade Agreement. Congress needs to bring this to the floor and pass this agreement. Why? Colombia already has free access to the U.S…

The gentleman is right. Earmarks proliferated under Republican watch. You're right about that. Both parties are guilty. That is why we should have a moratorium and clean the system up.

I don't know what kind of statistical contortion must have gone through producing that last chart. We just finished 52 consecutive months of job growth, the largest expansion in our Nation's history. But more to the point is this issue of…

I yield myself 1 minute simply to praise the majority leader before he leaves because he has been a man who has sincerely discussed and talked about the need to reform entitlements most of his career. And we need to talk to each other more…

I simply want to talk about the underlying Democratic Party budget. And there was a debate yesterday about this for a number of hours, whether there's a tax increase in the Democrats' budget or not. Well, when we hear the Democrat chairman…

I yield myself 30 seconds to make three points. The gentleman's revenue chart makes our point. After the dot-com bubble, we went into recession and revenues went down. After the tax cuts, and his own chart makes the point clear, revenues…

I simply want to ask if the Democratic budget balances the budget, if it achieves balance. Would the gentleman care to answer the question if the Democratic budget achieves balance in 2012?

Reclaiming my time from the chairman of Financial Services, I'm not sure if he's on the same page as the chairman of the Budget Committee. The chairman of the Budget Committee is claiming that their budget balances the budget by 2012. I'll…

The problem in Washington is spending is too high. Under the Democratic budget, the Medicare program today has an unfunded liability of $34 trillion. What does that mean per household, per family? Three hundred thousand dollars. Right now…

as the gentleman from Texas mentioned, we are not saying all earmarks are bad. Some of them are worthy. Some of them are vetted. Some of them fit within the proper role of the Federal Government. But a lot of them are bad. A lot of them…

Just one more friendly view. If you recall, this was a bipartisan bill when this passed when we were in the majority.

It makes no sense for child support payments not to go to the children. That is unfortunately what is happening today. And I would very much like to work with the gentlelady and anybody who is interested in coming up with the offsets in…

I believe our two parties agree on many things. We both agree on the need to balance the budget. We agree on the need for solid, sustained economic growth that produces an abundance of good-paying American jobs. And we agree that the…

Last year our friends on the other side of the aisle declared that they were going to "clean up the swamp" and get rid of the budget and its rampant waste, fraud, and abuse. In December of 2005, Speaker Pelosi proudly said, "The budget is…

Just to be clear, it's my understanding that the minority side agrees with fixing the public pension problem along with the smoothing problem and consented to putting both of those in the bill, but the majority had rejected that offer.