Judd Gregg

“ So by about the year 2025, because of the retirement of the baby boom generation, three programs--Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid--will absorb all the money that historically the Federal Government has spent, which means there will be no money left over for education, laying out roads, or environmental protection. ”

“ It also proposes tax policy which will radically increase taxes on working Americans and have the effect of stifling what has been an extraordinary economic expansion, which in part has been a function of having a tax policy which understands that if you let people keep their money, they tend to be more productive with those dollars, they tend to go out and take risks, be entrepreneurs, create jobs, and as a result, the Federal Government gets more revenue because people creating these jobs pay taxes and we end up with more economic activity. ”

“ We would be back on a path toward making sure we have a government that people can afford, while we still have a government that is delivering the services that people want. That should be our bottom-line goal. ”

“ Probably 80 percent of the people in this body are of the baby boom generation. And what we are doing is burying our heads in the sand and passing what we know is a huge problem--which is going to occur because all the people who are going to create this problem exist and they are going to retire--we are going to pass that problem on to our children and say: You figure it out, even though it is a problem we created. ”

“ It changes and reforms a lot of what are institutional mechanisms for the purposes of managing the day-to-day business of the spending of the Federal Government by putting in place baselines which are appropriate and limitations on the ability to spend money around here under reconciliation and limitations on the ability to raise taxes arbitrarily on the American people. ”

“ They basically add $200 billion of new spending over the next 5 years, and next year they dramatically increase spending, both through taking programs off the budget by declaring them emergencies, such as in the agricultural area, and putting them into the next year through advanced funding, which is a total gamesmanship, and then actually increasing the spending levels under the discretionary account. It is a grossly irresponsible cascade of new spending we see coming at us next year as a result of this Democratic budget. ”