Ron Kind: “These are not insignificant differences, a percentage point here, a percentage point there on projected economic growth.…”

“These are not insignificant differences, a percentage point here, a percentage point there on projected economic growth. When you project it out over 4, 5, 10 years, these numbers explode on you. And so it is important that we deal with an accurate projection and description of what the economy is doing and forecasting. When you see the OMB starting to manipulate these numbers, have these gimmicks within the bookkeeping system that have never been tried before in the last 40 years, it undermines the confidence that many of us have in the numbers that the administration is using in order to justify their budget requests. And it makes it a much more difficult proposition then to work in a bipartisan fashion to reach agreement on these important issues. That is why many of us earlier in the year when we were discussing the merits of a tax cut of this size were using more conservative numbers. Many of us supported an alternative tax proposal, one that was based on more conservative economic figures because we felt it was prudent and made fiscal sense to hedge our bets a little bit because as quickly as the surplus can appear, many of us knew it could disappear. Given the incredible size of our Nation's economy, a slight change in growth one way or the other was going to have a huge impact on budgetary decisions before this Congress.”